- Lesson details
- Transcript
- References
- Instructor
- Chris Legaspi
- Subjects
- Digital Art
- Topics
- Mediums
- Adobe Photoshop
- Duration
- 4h 16m 59s
- Series
- Photoshop for Traditional Artists
In this series, instructor Chris Legaspi shows you how to use Adobe Photoshop as an artist. In the fifth lesson of the series, Chris shows you how to create your own compositions using custom brushes and thumbnail frames. He goes over the gradient, paint bucket, marquee, hue/saturation, and vector shape tools. Follow along to understand layer hierarchy and the very useful technique of drawing over transparency to fine-tune your drawings within Photoshop. The lesson will conclude with Chris completing two assignments, which you should try for yourself!
Hardware & Software
- Adobe Photoshop CC
- Wacom Cintiq 24-inch HD Tablet
- Mac Pro
Beginner Friendly
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Now let’s talk about brushes.
We’re going to get into drawing.
We’re going to draw this lesson, I promise.
We’re going to start making art, I promise.
The first thing we need to do is we need to have our brushes locked and loaded.
Now I’m going to cover exactly the type of brushes that I use and I think that are
most useful for drawing and sketching and shading in Photoshop.
Let’s talk about brushes.
I’m going to make a new canvas, my good old default size.
I can change it at any time.
Okay, there are really four types of brushes that we need.
We need a hard-edged brush that we can use for masking and for doing tight details.
Really sharp, sharp edges, sharp details and masking.
We need some time of brush to sketch with.
It’s basically a brush to simulate a pencil.
And we need a soft airbrush.
This is perfect for blending and doing subtle details and things like that.
Soft airbrush.
The last brush we need is texture.
Something that can quickly simulate various textures that we may want in our comps.
This happens to be a leaf texture brush.
This workflow is going to mimic traditional, and that’s really my goal.
When I sit on Photoshop I think of it as a piece of paper or a canvas.
That’s exactly what I’m doing here.
These three brushes that I need, these are what I have on my desk.
I have ink pens, hard edge.
I have pencils, all different kinds of pencils for drawing and sketching.
I have a soft airbrush so these would be like, it’s basically techniques.
I can use blend, blending techniques, stumps, my finger to soften edges.
And texture, there are multiple ways to use texture.
Traditional we use paper.
So, everything I’m doing here is exactly like what I do with pencil and paper on canvas.
Sure, it’ll mimic the way that you work, and you can also, as you get experience you’ll
be able to fine-tune Photoshop to mimic exactly the way you work in traditional.
Okay, so let’s first set up a hard-edge brush.
What I have loaded are default Photoshop brushes.
I’m going to clean this up a little bit.
This is the brush pack that comes with Photoshop.
Remember, these thumbnails can be adjusted here, the drop-down menu.
I like small thumbnail.
You can also do stroke which shows you what the stroke looks like.
I like small thumbnail.
Let’s go got brush.
Now we can kind of see it and fine tune it, control it.
Right now I want an ink brush.
What I’m going to do is make sure I turn my spacing all the way down, zero transfer,
and make sure my opacity is all the way up.
For shape dynamics, make sure I have pin pressure control set to minimum diameter.
This is what the brush looks like.
It gives me that nice thick and thin.
It’s pretty cool, and of course, it’s very useful because it’s hard-edged.
You can make really type and sharp masks.
I really love to use masks.
We’re going to be doing quite a bit of that later when we add tones.
This is my ink brush.
I like this ink brush.
I like the size.
Of course, we can change the size too.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to save it.
I’m going to go to the drop-down menu at the upper right and go new brush preset.
I’ll call it ink 1 Just name it whatever you want.
There it is at the bottom.
We can also make a really thicker one that doesn’t have a thick or thin.
Let’s turn off shape dynamics, and now this is generic hard round.
Let’s make it a little bit bigger.
That way you can fill in large shapes with this one.
I’m going to save this as well.
New brush preset.
I’ll call it ink fill 1.
Just a nice big, blocky brush for bigger areas and bigger strokes.
Next is a drawing brush.
There are a couple of ways to do that.
Well, there are a bunch of ways.
A lot of time what I’ll do is I’ll take my ink brush.
Basically, my hard-edge brush.
I’ll just add transfer.
And the transfer is right here.
Remember, we’ll transfer it.
If you go to pen pressure control you can change the opacity jitter.
Notice the pen gets less opaque as it gets to the tip.
What that means is as you press down you get more pigment, more pixels, more ink or more
paint, whatever.
As you lighten, notice it gets lighter and lighter and lighter.
That’s what transfer does.
Often what I’ll do with transfer is I’ll combine transfer with opacity.
Right now it’s at 100%.
Let’s say if I just want to do a light quick pencil sketch, maybe I’ll drop the opacity to 60%.
Click 6 to quickly drop it, and now I have a lot of control and it's nice and light and subtle.
Typically that’s what I’ll do.
If I just want to quickly start drawing, I’ll take my ink brush
with shape dynamics and transfer.
I like this brush.
I’m going to go to new brush preset, and I’ll call it sketch 1.
Just name it sketch whatever.
There it is right there.
Another thing we could do is we could take the exact same brush, and if we want a little
bit of texture, of course, we can add texture using spacing and scattering.
First I’m going to give it a little bit of space like that.
Then I’m going to go to scatter and then move the scatter a little bit like that, and
then maybe increase the count a little bit.
It’s okay like that.
I see both axis.
That looks good.
What I want is sort of a random-y kind of feeling.
You see this kind of random bumpiness to it.
Let’s see what that looks like.
Now it has a little bit of texture.
This is round.
It’s a round brush so it looks kind of weird.
Typically what I’ll do is I’ll make like a square brush.
Remember, we can make a brush by using an image defining a brush preset.
When you see there is one in the stack.
There isn’t one in the stack.
It’s a texture brush.
It’s like a blocky texture brush.
We can go to tip shape.
Increase the spacing.
We can play with this, play with the parameters even more.
Just make it vertical here.
What I’m going to do is go to scattering and also change the count just so it has a
little bit of texture.
Now, when we go to draw with it, this one will have even more texture.
This is one is like—and of course, we can tweak the angle.
The angle is a little weird right now.
This is a way to get a drawing brush that looks a little bit more texture-y.
If you want to simulate drawing on paper, which you totally can do, now you have a nice
texture brush that you can use.
The last way to make a drawing brush is to just take a custom brush and shrink it.
Actually, just make it smaller.
These texture brushes are built into Photoshop here.
I just kind of opened them.
There was one that looks really good for drawing, actually.
Where did it go?
I grabbed it by accident.
Let’s just pick one.
I grabbed this one right here.
Nice texture brush.
What I can do to make it a drawing brush is to first go to shape dynamics.
Go to pen pressure.
Of course, turn to minimum diameter.
This time I’m going to make the minimum diameter not completely zero, maybe go to
20%, something like that, 15%.
It has a little bit of thickness.
I’m going to turn on transfer.
Go to pen pressure.
Then I’m going to turn on spacing.
Give it a little bit of space and some, a little bit of space that’s more toothy.
That’s a little too much space.
Do you see how it looks like—there you go.
That is pretty good.
Still too much spacing.
There you go.
Look at that.
I just took a brush, custom texture brush that was built into Photoshop, in this case,
and played with the different parameters until you get it right.
That’s pretty much all you have to do.
Once you pick a brush or you make a brush, you define a brush, then you just play with
the parameters until it gets the look and feel that you want.
I like this brush.
I want to save it.
Call it new brush preset.
I’ll call it sketch 2.
There it is in my stack.
Remember, we’ll have regular plain sketch and textural sketch.
Pretty cool.
Let me make a texture brush and an airbrush, then I’m going to define a preset.
First, let me make an airbrush.
I’ll just grab one, oh yeah, it’s pretty airbrush-y.
The default brush has this nice airbrush.
They’re pretty easy to make.
All you have to do is take a hard round brush and drop the hardness to zero.
I usually always add transfer to make it very, very subtle.
This is what it looks like.
That’s at 100% with pure black.
Imagine if you dropped the opacity to 50%.
It’d be more subtle, at 20% it’d be more subtle.
Of course, you can change the color.
You don’t have to paint pure black.
You can paint a nice midtone gray to make it subtle.
I like this brush, a nice big airbrush; 250 is a good size.
I want to save it as a preset.
New brush preset.
Call it airbrush 1.
Then finally I’m going to make a couple of texture brushes.
Let’s see, let’s take—I’m not going to make one.
I’m just going to use the ones that are here.
This one has that tilt feature.
I don’t really like that.
Yeah, I’m not really happy with these.
I might end up making my own.
Well, let me use this one.
Let’s see what the parameters are.
This is the brush.
What we need is some spacing.
It now has a little bit of space to it.
What I want to do is add a shape dynamics.
I want to do angle jitter, CTL-off and it’s going to rotate.
It kind of spins on itself to make it more random.
The final thing is going to add scatter.
Increase the count a little bit.
Remember, scatter helps us to make it textural.
Yeah, so nice and textural.
We can decrease the amount of scatter so you have a little bit more control.
Let’s turn the count way up.
Okay, good.
I just want to see—that brush is pretty big right now.
I need to zoom out to see it.
It’s pretty good.
I’m going to keep playing with it.
I’m not quite happy with it, so I’m just going to keep playing with it until it looks
and feels right.
The spacing was good.
Change the amount of scatter.
That feels pretty good.
Let’s lower it and see what happens.
It actually feels better.
I like the lower scatter to increase the count, see what happens.
Okay, lower count.
Back to where it was.
It might be a little bit too much spacing.
I think that’s the problem.
Getting there.
Getting there.
I’m just trying to get the perfect look right now.
Yeah, that looks pretty good.
Let me turn off spacing a little bit, lower the spacing, and lower the scatter a little bit.
Bring the scatter back.
Okay, that feels pretty good.
So, I like this brush.
I’m going to save it.
New brush preset.
I’m going to call it texture 1.
Let’s show what other default texture.
I really need to make my own because these brushes are so ugly.
Let’s see.
Let’s try this one.
This one is the exact same brush that I use for drawing.
Let’s see if we can turn it into a texture brush.
Increase the spacing.
Increase the scattering.
Increase the count quite a bit.
Let’s take the tip shape, add angle jitter.
See what that looks like.
That looks terrible.
I’m not crazy about that brush.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to make one.
Let’s just do a quick review on how to make a brush.
Let’s do 500 pixels.
We need a perfectly square image.
Make a new canvas, 300 dpi is good.
I’m going to fill this with, let’s fill it with a bunch of squares.
Just going to take my marquis.
Fill it with a bunch of boxes.
I wasn’t using pure black, so pure black and white.
Then we’re going to do select all and edit.
Define brush preset.
Call it sample brush 1 is fine.
Now, aha, now I go back.
Got my nice texture brush.
This time, this brush I can work with.
Increase the spacing.
Yeah, I can even make it—I’ll have to make it perfect geometric.
You can play with the angle jitter.
Now it’ll go kind of crazy.
Yeah, like that.
Make this scattering a little bit more.
Count a little bit more.
Let’s shrink it and let’s see what it looks like.
Yeah, that’s really cool.
Of course, it’s very geometric and stylized looking texture, but it should work for now.
This should work for now.
We’re going to save it.
Let’s see if that’s—because I may not want too much angle jitter.
I’m trying to debate whether I want angle jitter or not.
This looks pretty good, actually.
Keep playing with the settings until it looks right.
Let me give myself a little bit of angle jitter.
Okay, that’s perfect.
I think that looks pretty good.
That looks pretty good.
It’s kind of texture-y and toothy.
I like this brush for now.
The new brush preset.
Call it texture—square.
I don’t know.
You can name it whatever you want.
Now it’s in my stack.
This 488 is the first one, the plain one, so I’m going to delete that.
All the information in this box.
I can bring it back to its original form.
I’m just going to cut this one by holding ALT.
Now I have pretty much the three brushes that I need or the four, and now what I’m going
to do clean up this set.
I’ll go to preset manager, and I’m going to select all of these ugly default brushes
that I hate and hit delete.
Done.
Only the brushes that I created today.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
And I’m going to save this as a preset so that I can have access to it.
It’s going to save it as an .abr file, which is Photoshop brush file.
Okay, we covered a lot of stuff.
The brushes are a little bit complex, especially if it’s the first time you’ve seen this
or played with them, so I wanted to take my time to cover and review all about the brushes
how to get started.
Now let’s actually use them.
This is the fun part.
We’re going to get into drawing.
We’re going to draw this lesson, I promise.
We’re going to start making art, I promise.
The first thing we need to do is we need to have our brushes locked and loaded.
Now I’m going to cover exactly the type of brushes that I use and I think that are
most useful for drawing and sketching and shading in Photoshop.
Let’s talk about brushes.
I’m going to make a new canvas, my good old default size.
I can change it at any time.
Okay, there are really four types of brushes that we need.
We need a hard-edged brush that we can use for masking and for doing tight details.
Really sharp, sharp edges, sharp details and masking.
We need some time of brush to sketch with.
It’s basically a brush to simulate a pencil.
And we need a soft airbrush.
This is perfect for blending and doing subtle details and things like that.
Soft airbrush.
The last brush we need is texture.
Something that can quickly simulate various textures that we may want in our comps.
This happens to be a leaf texture brush.
This workflow is going to mimic traditional, and that’s really my goal.
When I sit on Photoshop I think of it as a piece of paper or a canvas.
That’s exactly what I’m doing here.
These three brushes that I need, these are what I have on my desk.
I have ink pens, hard edge.
I have pencils, all different kinds of pencils for drawing and sketching.
I have a soft airbrush so these would be like, it’s basically techniques.
I can use blend, blending techniques, stumps, my finger to soften edges.
And texture, there are multiple ways to use texture.
Traditional we use paper.
So, everything I’m doing here is exactly like what I do with pencil and paper on canvas.
Sure, it’ll mimic the way that you work, and you can also, as you get experience you’ll
be able to fine-tune Photoshop to mimic exactly the way you work in traditional.
Okay, so let’s first set up a hard-edge brush.
What I have loaded are default Photoshop brushes.
I’m going to clean this up a little bit.
This is the brush pack that comes with Photoshop.
Remember, these thumbnails can be adjusted here, the drop-down menu.
I like small thumbnail.
You can also do stroke which shows you what the stroke looks like.
I like small thumbnail.
Let’s go got brush.
Now we can kind of see it and fine tune it, control it.
Right now I want an ink brush.
What I’m going to do is make sure I turn my spacing all the way down, zero transfer,
and make sure my opacity is all the way up.
For shape dynamics, make sure I have pin pressure control set to minimum diameter.
This is what the brush looks like.
It gives me that nice thick and thin.
It’s pretty cool, and of course, it’s very useful because it’s hard-edged.
You can make really type and sharp masks.
I really love to use masks.
We’re going to be doing quite a bit of that later when we add tones.
This is my ink brush.
I like this ink brush.
I like the size.
Of course, we can change the size too.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to save it.
I’m going to go to the drop-down menu at the upper right and go new brush preset.
I’ll call it ink 1 Just name it whatever you want.
There it is at the bottom.
We can also make a really thicker one that doesn’t have a thick or thin.
Let’s turn off shape dynamics, and now this is generic hard round.
Let’s make it a little bit bigger.
That way you can fill in large shapes with this one.
I’m going to save this as well.
New brush preset.
I’ll call it ink fill 1.
Just a nice big, blocky brush for bigger areas and bigger strokes.
Next is a drawing brush.
There are a couple of ways to do that.
Well, there are a bunch of ways.
A lot of time what I’ll do is I’ll take my ink brush.
Basically, my hard-edge brush.
I’ll just add transfer.
And the transfer is right here.
Remember, we’ll transfer it.
If you go to pen pressure control you can change the opacity jitter.
Notice the pen gets less opaque as it gets to the tip.
What that means is as you press down you get more pigment, more pixels, more ink or more
paint, whatever.
As you lighten, notice it gets lighter and lighter and lighter.
That’s what transfer does.
Often what I’ll do with transfer is I’ll combine transfer with opacity.
Right now it’s at 100%.
Let’s say if I just want to do a light quick pencil sketch, maybe I’ll drop the opacity to 60%.
Click 6 to quickly drop it, and now I have a lot of control and it's nice and light and subtle.
Typically that’s what I’ll do.
If I just want to quickly start drawing, I’ll take my ink brush
with shape dynamics and transfer.
I like this brush.
I’m going to go to new brush preset, and I’ll call it sketch 1.
Just name it sketch whatever.
There it is right there.
Another thing we could do is we could take the exact same brush, and if we want a little
bit of texture, of course, we can add texture using spacing and scattering.
First I’m going to give it a little bit of space like that.
Then I’m going to go to scatter and then move the scatter a little bit like that, and
then maybe increase the count a little bit.
It’s okay like that.
I see both axis.
That looks good.
What I want is sort of a random-y kind of feeling.
You see this kind of random bumpiness to it.
Let’s see what that looks like.
Now it has a little bit of texture.
This is round.
It’s a round brush so it looks kind of weird.
Typically what I’ll do is I’ll make like a square brush.
Remember, we can make a brush by using an image defining a brush preset.
When you see there is one in the stack.
There isn’t one in the stack.
It’s a texture brush.
It’s like a blocky texture brush.
We can go to tip shape.
Increase the spacing.
We can play with this, play with the parameters even more.
Just make it vertical here.
What I’m going to do is go to scattering and also change the count just so it has a
little bit of texture.
Now, when we go to draw with it, this one will have even more texture.
This is one is like—and of course, we can tweak the angle.
The angle is a little weird right now.
This is a way to get a drawing brush that looks a little bit more texture-y.
If you want to simulate drawing on paper, which you totally can do, now you have a nice
texture brush that you can use.
The last way to make a drawing brush is to just take a custom brush and shrink it.
Actually, just make it smaller.
These texture brushes are built into Photoshop here.
I just kind of opened them.
There was one that looks really good for drawing, actually.
Where did it go?
I grabbed it by accident.
Let’s just pick one.
I grabbed this one right here.
Nice texture brush.
What I can do to make it a drawing brush is to first go to shape dynamics.
Go to pen pressure.
Of course, turn to minimum diameter.
This time I’m going to make the minimum diameter not completely zero, maybe go to
20%, something like that, 15%.
It has a little bit of thickness.
I’m going to turn on transfer.
Go to pen pressure.
Then I’m going to turn on spacing.
Give it a little bit of space and some, a little bit of space that’s more toothy.
That’s a little too much space.
Do you see how it looks like—there you go.
That is pretty good.
Still too much spacing.
There you go.
Look at that.
I just took a brush, custom texture brush that was built into Photoshop, in this case,
and played with the different parameters until you get it right.
That’s pretty much all you have to do.
Once you pick a brush or you make a brush, you define a brush, then you just play with
the parameters until it gets the look and feel that you want.
I like this brush.
I want to save it.
Call it new brush preset.
I’ll call it sketch 2.
There it is in my stack.
Remember, we’ll have regular plain sketch and textural sketch.
Pretty cool.
Let me make a texture brush and an airbrush, then I’m going to define a preset.
First, let me make an airbrush.
I’ll just grab one, oh yeah, it’s pretty airbrush-y.
The default brush has this nice airbrush.
They’re pretty easy to make.
All you have to do is take a hard round brush and drop the hardness to zero.
I usually always add transfer to make it very, very subtle.
This is what it looks like.
That’s at 100% with pure black.
Imagine if you dropped the opacity to 50%.
It’d be more subtle, at 20% it’d be more subtle.
Of course, you can change the color.
You don’t have to paint pure black.
You can paint a nice midtone gray to make it subtle.
I like this brush, a nice big airbrush; 250 is a good size.
I want to save it as a preset.
New brush preset.
Call it airbrush 1.
Then finally I’m going to make a couple of texture brushes.
Let’s see, let’s take—I’m not going to make one.
I’m just going to use the ones that are here.
This one has that tilt feature.
I don’t really like that.
Yeah, I’m not really happy with these.
I might end up making my own.
Well, let me use this one.
Let’s see what the parameters are.
This is the brush.
What we need is some spacing.
It now has a little bit of space to it.
What I want to do is add a shape dynamics.
I want to do angle jitter, CTL-off and it’s going to rotate.
It kind of spins on itself to make it more random.
The final thing is going to add scatter.
Increase the count a little bit.
Remember, scatter helps us to make it textural.
Yeah, so nice and textural.
We can decrease the amount of scatter so you have a little bit more control.
Let’s turn the count way up.
Okay, good.
I just want to see—that brush is pretty big right now.
I need to zoom out to see it.
It’s pretty good.
I’m going to keep playing with it.
I’m not quite happy with it, so I’m just going to keep playing with it until it looks
and feels right.
The spacing was good.
Change the amount of scatter.
That feels pretty good.
Let’s lower it and see what happens.
It actually feels better.
I like the lower scatter to increase the count, see what happens.
Okay, lower count.
Back to where it was.
It might be a little bit too much spacing.
I think that’s the problem.
Getting there.
Getting there.
I’m just trying to get the perfect look right now.
Yeah, that looks pretty good.
Let me turn off spacing a little bit, lower the spacing, and lower the scatter a little bit.
Bring the scatter back.
Okay, that feels pretty good.
So, I like this brush.
I’m going to save it.
New brush preset.
I’m going to call it texture 1.
Let’s show what other default texture.
I really need to make my own because these brushes are so ugly.
Let’s see.
Let’s try this one.
This one is the exact same brush that I use for drawing.
Let’s see if we can turn it into a texture brush.
Increase the spacing.
Increase the scattering.
Increase the count quite a bit.
Let’s take the tip shape, add angle jitter.
See what that looks like.
That looks terrible.
I’m not crazy about that brush.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to make one.
Let’s just do a quick review on how to make a brush.
Let’s do 500 pixels.
We need a perfectly square image.
Make a new canvas, 300 dpi is good.
I’m going to fill this with, let’s fill it with a bunch of squares.
Just going to take my marquis.
Fill it with a bunch of boxes.
I wasn’t using pure black, so pure black and white.
Then we’re going to do select all and edit.
Define brush preset.
Call it sample brush 1 is fine.
Now, aha, now I go back.
Got my nice texture brush.
This time, this brush I can work with.
Increase the spacing.
Yeah, I can even make it—I’ll have to make it perfect geometric.
You can play with the angle jitter.
Now it’ll go kind of crazy.
Yeah, like that.
Make this scattering a little bit more.
Count a little bit more.
Let’s shrink it and let’s see what it looks like.
Yeah, that’s really cool.
Of course, it’s very geometric and stylized looking texture, but it should work for now.
This should work for now.
We’re going to save it.
Let’s see if that’s—because I may not want too much angle jitter.
I’m trying to debate whether I want angle jitter or not.
This looks pretty good, actually.
Keep playing with the settings until it looks right.
Let me give myself a little bit of angle jitter.
Okay, that’s perfect.
I think that looks pretty good.
That looks pretty good.
It’s kind of texture-y and toothy.
I like this brush for now.
The new brush preset.
Call it texture—square.
I don’t know.
You can name it whatever you want.
Now it’s in my stack.
This 488 is the first one, the plain one, so I’m going to delete that.
All the information in this box.
I can bring it back to its original form.
I’m just going to cut this one by holding ALT.
Now I have pretty much the three brushes that I need or the four, and now what I’m going
to do clean up this set.
I’ll go to preset manager, and I’m going to select all of these ugly default brushes
that I hate and hit delete.
Done.
Only the brushes that I created today.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
And I’m going to save this as a preset so that I can have access to it.
It’s going to save it as an .abr file, which is Photoshop brush file.
Okay, we covered a lot of stuff.
The brushes are a little bit complex, especially if it’s the first time you’ve seen this
or played with them, so I wanted to take my time to cover and review all about the brushes
how to get started.
Now let’s actually use them.
This is the fun part.
AUTO SCROLL
Thanks for making it through the foundational part.
Now we’re going to actually draw and tone and because to use the brushes.
Okay, let me make a new file.
Okay, so in this section what I want to cover is how to make marks and adjust your marks
on the fly and to actually use the various tools to begin to render.
One of the first things that we want to know—well, first, let’s talk about brush size.
Brush size real quick, the hot key is the brackets, the ones that look like this.
It’s a small brush.
I’m hitting brackets.
That’s a quick hot key I use quite a bit.
You can also do the same thing here with the slider and also here on your brush presets
of course.
So, I like brackets.
Just a good shortcut.
Okay, the next thing is using opacity.
Opacity is up here in your options.
Opacity is how opaque your brush mark is.
Remember, if we go to our brush settings, if we don’t have transfer right, our brush
is full opaque throughout the stroke.
It looks kind of like that.
Here we have the thick or thin going.
Right now I’m using pure black.
One of the ways to get subtlety and variety in your marks is with opacity.
For example, if you drop the opacity you can get a more subtle more.
I’m going to hit 5 which is the numeric hotkey for 50% opacity.
Watch the mark.
It’s black, same color, 100% same brush, 100% opacity on the layer, but it’s made
less opaque because the brush, the opacity of the brush.
If I drop it down even more I’m going to hit 2, the number 2, which is the hot key
for 20, of course.
Look at that, even lighter.
One, even lighter.
Let’s go back to a higher number.
Let’s say I go back to 8, 80% opacity.
You see how we can really nice results using opacity.
I use it quite a bit.
For example, let’s say you want to sketch something.
Let’s say you want to sketch a face.
You want to do your construction lines and things.
You don’t want to do them with 100% opacity.
Right now I’m at 40%.
Lines are nice and thick or, excuse me, thin to simulate traditional drawing.
With traditional drawing to get finer lines you just lift up your pencil, in other words,
less opaque stuff.
Again, you see the reoccurring theme here?
My philosophy is to match traditional, and I know a lot of you watching are traditional
artists like me.
This is, I think, the most fun way to use Photoshop.
Whatever I do, I try to bring it back to old school traditional methods, and I try to mimic
it as best as possible.
Opacity is one of the tools I do that with.
Then when I’m ready, let’s say I want to do like an ink drawing style, like a comic
style, more illustrative style.
I want to start adding ink lines.
What I could do is turn the opacity back up to 100% and then right now I’m able to kind
of go over my drawing exactly like working with—this simulates a pen and ink
type of sketching.
Let’s say I want to get more subtle around the eyes, I could drop the opacity a little
bit, let’s say to 80%.
The line is not as intense, still dark and much clearer.
Let’s say I wanted to add a subtle detail here, but I don’t want to make it too dark.
I can drop the opacity to, let’s say, like 20% and just go over the line.
I can even start shading with hatching using 20% opaque pure black, 20% opaque, and look
at the hatching I’m able to get.
Extremely, extremely versatile working method.
I use it quite a bit.
I can fill in the shadow.
Go darker if I want.
So, quite versatile when you start to get comfortable with opacity.
Another way to use opacity to your advantage is actually with the layer opacity.
Let’s say I’ve got this drawing here…let’s say I like the drawing but the lines I made
are a little too thick.
What I could do is actually lower the opacity of the layer.
Watch this.
Here is my thick drawing.
Full opaque.
I can drop the opacity as much as I want and make it very subtle, less subtle,
about halfway right there. I like that.
Let’s keep it halfway.
I can make a new layer, either put it above or below it.
Just call this sketch either above or below, and now I can start doing subtle shading.
Maybe I’ll drop the opacity of my brush to like 40%.
Now I can do subtle fixes, refinements and subtle detail using hatch with my
little drawing brush. A lot of stuff we can do.
We can even start to add a little bit of shading on these lips.
Going to add some freckles, you know, I’m just trying to come up with any old thing
I can start to add.
I can add my halftone lines.
I can work on the core shadow here, some of the anatomy detail, some more wrinkles and
things. There is a lot we can do with opacity.
I can even take this layer.
Let’s say, I don’t, this layer is too strong.
I can drop its opacity.
So, lots of different options especially if you work with multiple layers, which I think
is a great practice.
I can drop this a little bit.
Then I’m going to merge the two.
Another way to get opacity is with the transfer tool, so remember that transfer is an option
in your brush controls.
What it does is gives you the option to do opacity jitter, opacity jitter.
Notice our stroke, and as long as it’s set to pen pressure, which is perfect for a Wacom
pen like this, and you put your minimum all the way down, what you can get is a brush
that get less opaque as you lift up.
This is 100% opacity, a full black thing, full black is my color.
But, see as I lift off, I get that.
It’s pretty cool, right.
I can do the exact opposite, go thin to thin.
That’s opacity jitter.
This is quite useful especially for sketching, and it’s really nice for adding tones and
shading, which we’ll get to shortly, I promise.
I can combine transfer with my opacity menu.
I can keep sketching, keep hatching.
Keep adding detail and refining.
Let me flip my imagination drawing here.
There might be some things off about it.
Of course, whatever you do to brush you can do to erase.
For example, I do the eye and I go, oh crap, I covered up the pupil, no worries,
or the highlight.
Just grab the same style brush.
An eraser works just like a brush, especially if the mode is set to brush.
You can play with opacity.
That’s 100% opaque erase.
Gives you a hard edge.
If you want a little bit softer edge lower the opacity.
This is 20%, and I can just keep going over it until the edge feels right, until the highlight
feels right.
I could erase that and make it a little bit more subtle.
Erase whatever mark—let’s say I put some detail over here.
He’s got too many wrinkles.
He looks a little too old.
Let’s grab my eraser and start to do that.
This is a 20% eraser.
If I go to 80% notice it’s more aggressive.
Just so many things you can do with opacity.
Works with brush.
Works with an eraser.
One last thing is a couple great ways to add tone.
I’m going to make a flat brush.
I haven’t made a flat brush in this set.
This brush is fine.
No, it’s not.
I’m going to make me a flat brush here.
If you see me making a new brush, a lot of this was covered in previous lessons.
Make sure to review that if you get a little lost or if you forget this step.
We’ll continue to review, of course, but definitely check back to previous lessons
for more detail about that.
I’m just going to make a flat brush here and make sure it’s set to follow.
Angle jitter set to direction.
Okay, good.
I’m going to treat this.
I’m going to make a new layer.
I’m going to call this sketch.
Make a new layer.
Let’s say he has black hair and I want to fill in his black hair.
This is 100% opacity.
That looks a little too blocky, right?
Fill in the side maybe.
I can lower the opacity here.
I can do that.
I can change the value.
But, something else I can do is lower the opacity of my brush as well.
Drop it to, let’s say, 20.
Let’s see how I can build up the tone.
The brush is kind of ugly.
It’s ugly and flat.
It’s a lot like marker.
If I go to 20, say I go to 40, and then I go to 80, it gets nice and dark.
You can almost make a gradation.
A lot of times I’ll do that.
When I add tones I think of it as a marker rendering like this eye.
I want to put a subtle tone in this eye, just use 10% opacity.
Do you see the possibilities?
You see what we’re getting at here?
This is the beginning of making your own artwork directly in the computer.
This is one of the most powerful tools to master, learning the many ways you can draw
and tone and shade with simply the brushes.
Of course, you add textures, add a textural custom brush it’ll look even better.
Of course, we can also apply transfer to our brushes, get even more subtle.
This is transfer combined with low opacity.
It’s really cool there.
Look how subtle those tones are.
It’s starting to look like a marker rendering.
Of course, this whole layer I can play with the opacity here as well to make it a little
bit less subtle, more subtle.
Just keep playing with it.
A lot of things we can do simply with opacity.
The final thing that we can do is use a hue set.
Hue set is our good friend, and you’re probably going to get sick of me talking about it,
but it’s extremely powerful, in my opinion.
Let’s say, for example, that tone example.
That tone is ugly.
I want to get rid of it.
Let’s say, for example, for this tone we’ll make it 100%.
You may notice that it’s not really affecting the drawing layer, the drawing itself.
That’s because it’s on another layer.
That’s a good habit.
You’ll probably get tired of me saying that too.
Let’s say I tone his hair.
This person has dark hair, my little character here, but it’s a little too dark.
What should we do?
Well, because it’s on his own layer I could bring up my buddy hue set.
Remember cmd + U, under image adjustment, of course.
It’s also down here as a layer adjustment.
Guess what we do.
We fine tune it until we get the perfect value.
This is typically how I work nowadays.
I just drop any old tone.
I call up the hue set immediately.
Let’s say I want a gradation, the perfect gradation from here to the top.
I guess what I’m going to do here, that’s on a new layer.
Hue set it up, get the perfect—boom—look at that.
Merge it down.
One more.
Look at that beautiful gradation.
Bring up hue set again.
Let’s see.
That looks pretty good.
Boom.
Do you see how we’re able to get nice beautiful tones using the hue set.
It’s just one of three ways now that you know.
There is one of three ways to use your brushes to get subtlety and to get the most out of
your brushes and to control your brushes.
One is with the opacity control of the brush itself.
Two is with layers.
If I don’t like this layer, if it’s too opaque, if it’s too dark or too opaque,
boom, just drop the opacity.
The third is hue set.
Let’s say these lines are too dark, I can just lighten them.
I can even change their color.
Of course, we know about colorize now.
For example, let’s say, what I’m going to do is I’m going to group this sketch,
I want to keep these layers.
I want to duplicate the group and then merge this work here.
Let’s say, for example, I don’t like it black and white.
I can bring up hue set and click colorize.
Now I can color my sketch, my drawing, my tones whatever I want.
Let’s say what I want to do is really just clean this up.
Let’s say I’m going to make it blue like that.
Drop the opacity.
Now I can go over it with pure black so I can really clean up the drawing.
Let’s say I wanted to get rid of all of these construction lines.
I’m able to do that with the many layer tools and so forth.
I can just keep going until I clean up my drawing.
Now it’s pure black and white.
Then we can just take out our sketch.
This is a lot of times, in one of my previous lifetimes, I did some 2D animation work, animators
love to draw in this blue pencil, so this is similar to animation style drawing.
They’ll do a blue pencil drawing like this and then put another clean sheet of paper
on a light table, and then they’ll be able to trace.
Then if you go to drawing, let’s say, oh, I’ve got a drawing, but the black lines
are so boring and ugly, right?
We don’t want black lines.
It looks too dull, too boring.
We can change the color of our lines.
Just bring up hue set.
We can make it lighter.
We can make it darker.
We can also colorize.
Click colorize.
Crank up your saturation and the lightness in this case because you need a little bit
of value to see color.
You need to be in the midtones.
Look at that.
You can make it brown.
Then you can play with saturation.
If it’s too saturated, less saturated.
You can just do so many things with those three controls.
So many things.
Finally, one last tip I want to show you is too quickly, let’s say I like this drawing
and I want to quickly thicken the lines or thicken the tone.
Let’s say I drop a tone.
I’m going to color pick this brown.
I just quickly use a big flat brush to tone his hair.
Let’s say, oh, I like that, but I want it to be thicker.
You can just duplicate the layer.
There are two ways to do that.
Cmd + J is the shortcut.
Boom, look at that.
Now it’s starting to stack.
As I stack I’m going to merge them down.
You can also just drag it to the new layer button.
Boom, duplicate it.
Bring up hue set to make it more or less subtle, darker, less saturated, more saturated.
Lots of things you can do.
Same with the ink lines.
This is the drawing.
If I want to just thicken the lines right away, just boom, double the layers.
That’s just a quick tip that I use quite a bit.
Then merge down.
Cmd+ E. Rock and roll.
Okay, so we touched on brushes.
There is a lot more you can do.
Those are just the basics.
Like I said many times in previous lessons, the basics, of course, are the best.
You’ll be using them every time, any time for the rest, as long as Photoshop exists.
Now we’re going to actually draw and tone and because to use the brushes.
Okay, let me make a new file.
Okay, so in this section what I want to cover is how to make marks and adjust your marks
on the fly and to actually use the various tools to begin to render.
One of the first things that we want to know—well, first, let’s talk about brush size.
Brush size real quick, the hot key is the brackets, the ones that look like this.
It’s a small brush.
I’m hitting brackets.
That’s a quick hot key I use quite a bit.
You can also do the same thing here with the slider and also here on your brush presets
of course.
So, I like brackets.
Just a good shortcut.
Okay, the next thing is using opacity.
Opacity is up here in your options.
Opacity is how opaque your brush mark is.
Remember, if we go to our brush settings, if we don’t have transfer right, our brush
is full opaque throughout the stroke.
It looks kind of like that.
Here we have the thick or thin going.
Right now I’m using pure black.
One of the ways to get subtlety and variety in your marks is with opacity.
For example, if you drop the opacity you can get a more subtle more.
I’m going to hit 5 which is the numeric hotkey for 50% opacity.
Watch the mark.
It’s black, same color, 100% same brush, 100% opacity on the layer, but it’s made
less opaque because the brush, the opacity of the brush.
If I drop it down even more I’m going to hit 2, the number 2, which is the hot key
for 20, of course.
Look at that, even lighter.
One, even lighter.
Let’s go back to a higher number.
Let’s say I go back to 8, 80% opacity.
You see how we can really nice results using opacity.
I use it quite a bit.
For example, let’s say you want to sketch something.
Let’s say you want to sketch a face.
You want to do your construction lines and things.
You don’t want to do them with 100% opacity.
Right now I’m at 40%.
Lines are nice and thick or, excuse me, thin to simulate traditional drawing.
With traditional drawing to get finer lines you just lift up your pencil, in other words,
less opaque stuff.
Again, you see the reoccurring theme here?
My philosophy is to match traditional, and I know a lot of you watching are traditional
artists like me.
This is, I think, the most fun way to use Photoshop.
Whatever I do, I try to bring it back to old school traditional methods, and I try to mimic
it as best as possible.
Opacity is one of the tools I do that with.
Then when I’m ready, let’s say I want to do like an ink drawing style, like a comic
style, more illustrative style.
I want to start adding ink lines.
What I could do is turn the opacity back up to 100% and then right now I’m able to kind
of go over my drawing exactly like working with—this simulates a pen and ink
type of sketching.
Let’s say I want to get more subtle around the eyes, I could drop the opacity a little
bit, let’s say to 80%.
The line is not as intense, still dark and much clearer.
Let’s say I wanted to add a subtle detail here, but I don’t want to make it too dark.
I can drop the opacity to, let’s say, like 20% and just go over the line.
I can even start shading with hatching using 20% opaque pure black, 20% opaque, and look
at the hatching I’m able to get.
Extremely, extremely versatile working method.
I use it quite a bit.
I can fill in the shadow.
Go darker if I want.
So, quite versatile when you start to get comfortable with opacity.
Another way to use opacity to your advantage is actually with the layer opacity.
Let’s say I’ve got this drawing here…let’s say I like the drawing but the lines I made
are a little too thick.
What I could do is actually lower the opacity of the layer.
Watch this.
Here is my thick drawing.
Full opaque.
I can drop the opacity as much as I want and make it very subtle, less subtle,
about halfway right there. I like that.
Let’s keep it halfway.
I can make a new layer, either put it above or below it.
Just call this sketch either above or below, and now I can start doing subtle shading.
Maybe I’ll drop the opacity of my brush to like 40%.
Now I can do subtle fixes, refinements and subtle detail using hatch with my
little drawing brush. A lot of stuff we can do.
We can even start to add a little bit of shading on these lips.
Going to add some freckles, you know, I’m just trying to come up with any old thing
I can start to add.
I can add my halftone lines.
I can work on the core shadow here, some of the anatomy detail, some more wrinkles and
things. There is a lot we can do with opacity.
I can even take this layer.
Let’s say, I don’t, this layer is too strong.
I can drop its opacity.
So, lots of different options especially if you work with multiple layers, which I think
is a great practice.
I can drop this a little bit.
Then I’m going to merge the two.
Another way to get opacity is with the transfer tool, so remember that transfer is an option
in your brush controls.
What it does is gives you the option to do opacity jitter, opacity jitter.
Notice our stroke, and as long as it’s set to pen pressure, which is perfect for a Wacom
pen like this, and you put your minimum all the way down, what you can get is a brush
that get less opaque as you lift up.
This is 100% opacity, a full black thing, full black is my color.
But, see as I lift off, I get that.
It’s pretty cool, right.
I can do the exact opposite, go thin to thin.
That’s opacity jitter.
This is quite useful especially for sketching, and it’s really nice for adding tones and
shading, which we’ll get to shortly, I promise.
I can combine transfer with my opacity menu.
I can keep sketching, keep hatching.
Keep adding detail and refining.
Let me flip my imagination drawing here.
There might be some things off about it.
Of course, whatever you do to brush you can do to erase.
For example, I do the eye and I go, oh crap, I covered up the pupil, no worries,
or the highlight.
Just grab the same style brush.
An eraser works just like a brush, especially if the mode is set to brush.
You can play with opacity.
That’s 100% opaque erase.
Gives you a hard edge.
If you want a little bit softer edge lower the opacity.
This is 20%, and I can just keep going over it until the edge feels right, until the highlight
feels right.
I could erase that and make it a little bit more subtle.
Erase whatever mark—let’s say I put some detail over here.
He’s got too many wrinkles.
He looks a little too old.
Let’s grab my eraser and start to do that.
This is a 20% eraser.
If I go to 80% notice it’s more aggressive.
Just so many things you can do with opacity.
Works with brush.
Works with an eraser.
One last thing is a couple great ways to add tone.
I’m going to make a flat brush.
I haven’t made a flat brush in this set.
This brush is fine.
No, it’s not.
I’m going to make me a flat brush here.
If you see me making a new brush, a lot of this was covered in previous lessons.
Make sure to review that if you get a little lost or if you forget this step.
We’ll continue to review, of course, but definitely check back to previous lessons
for more detail about that.
I’m just going to make a flat brush here and make sure it’s set to follow.
Angle jitter set to direction.
Okay, good.
I’m going to treat this.
I’m going to make a new layer.
I’m going to call this sketch.
Make a new layer.
Let’s say he has black hair and I want to fill in his black hair.
This is 100% opacity.
That looks a little too blocky, right?
Fill in the side maybe.
I can lower the opacity here.
I can do that.
I can change the value.
But, something else I can do is lower the opacity of my brush as well.
Drop it to, let’s say, 20.
Let’s see how I can build up the tone.
The brush is kind of ugly.
It’s ugly and flat.
It’s a lot like marker.
If I go to 20, say I go to 40, and then I go to 80, it gets nice and dark.
You can almost make a gradation.
A lot of times I’ll do that.
When I add tones I think of it as a marker rendering like this eye.
I want to put a subtle tone in this eye, just use 10% opacity.
Do you see the possibilities?
You see what we’re getting at here?
This is the beginning of making your own artwork directly in the computer.
This is one of the most powerful tools to master, learning the many ways you can draw
and tone and shade with simply the brushes.
Of course, you add textures, add a textural custom brush it’ll look even better.
Of course, we can also apply transfer to our brushes, get even more subtle.
This is transfer combined with low opacity.
It’s really cool there.
Look how subtle those tones are.
It’s starting to look like a marker rendering.
Of course, this whole layer I can play with the opacity here as well to make it a little
bit less subtle, more subtle.
Just keep playing with it.
A lot of things we can do simply with opacity.
The final thing that we can do is use a hue set.
Hue set is our good friend, and you’re probably going to get sick of me talking about it,
but it’s extremely powerful, in my opinion.
Let’s say, for example, that tone example.
That tone is ugly.
I want to get rid of it.
Let’s say, for example, for this tone we’ll make it 100%.
You may notice that it’s not really affecting the drawing layer, the drawing itself.
That’s because it’s on another layer.
That’s a good habit.
You’ll probably get tired of me saying that too.
Let’s say I tone his hair.
This person has dark hair, my little character here, but it’s a little too dark.
What should we do?
Well, because it’s on his own layer I could bring up my buddy hue set.
Remember cmd + U, under image adjustment, of course.
It’s also down here as a layer adjustment.
Guess what we do.
We fine tune it until we get the perfect value.
This is typically how I work nowadays.
I just drop any old tone.
I call up the hue set immediately.
Let’s say I want a gradation, the perfect gradation from here to the top.
I guess what I’m going to do here, that’s on a new layer.
Hue set it up, get the perfect—boom—look at that.
Merge it down.
One more.
Look at that beautiful gradation.
Bring up hue set again.
Let’s see.
That looks pretty good.
Boom.
Do you see how we’re able to get nice beautiful tones using the hue set.
It’s just one of three ways now that you know.
There is one of three ways to use your brushes to get subtlety and to get the most out of
your brushes and to control your brushes.
One is with the opacity control of the brush itself.
Two is with layers.
If I don’t like this layer, if it’s too opaque, if it’s too dark or too opaque,
boom, just drop the opacity.
The third is hue set.
Let’s say these lines are too dark, I can just lighten them.
I can even change their color.
Of course, we know about colorize now.
For example, let’s say, what I’m going to do is I’m going to group this sketch,
I want to keep these layers.
I want to duplicate the group and then merge this work here.
Let’s say, for example, I don’t like it black and white.
I can bring up hue set and click colorize.
Now I can color my sketch, my drawing, my tones whatever I want.
Let’s say what I want to do is really just clean this up.
Let’s say I’m going to make it blue like that.
Drop the opacity.
Now I can go over it with pure black so I can really clean up the drawing.
Let’s say I wanted to get rid of all of these construction lines.
I’m able to do that with the many layer tools and so forth.
I can just keep going until I clean up my drawing.
Now it’s pure black and white.
Then we can just take out our sketch.
This is a lot of times, in one of my previous lifetimes, I did some 2D animation work, animators
love to draw in this blue pencil, so this is similar to animation style drawing.
They’ll do a blue pencil drawing like this and then put another clean sheet of paper
on a light table, and then they’ll be able to trace.
Then if you go to drawing, let’s say, oh, I’ve got a drawing, but the black lines
are so boring and ugly, right?
We don’t want black lines.
It looks too dull, too boring.
We can change the color of our lines.
Just bring up hue set.
We can make it lighter.
We can make it darker.
We can also colorize.
Click colorize.
Crank up your saturation and the lightness in this case because you need a little bit
of value to see color.
You need to be in the midtones.
Look at that.
You can make it brown.
Then you can play with saturation.
If it’s too saturated, less saturated.
You can just do so many things with those three controls.
So many things.
Finally, one last tip I want to show you is too quickly, let’s say I like this drawing
and I want to quickly thicken the lines or thicken the tone.
Let’s say I drop a tone.
I’m going to color pick this brown.
I just quickly use a big flat brush to tone his hair.
Let’s say, oh, I like that, but I want it to be thicker.
You can just duplicate the layer.
There are two ways to do that.
Cmd + J is the shortcut.
Boom, look at that.
Now it’s starting to stack.
As I stack I’m going to merge them down.
You can also just drag it to the new layer button.
Boom, duplicate it.
Bring up hue set to make it more or less subtle, darker, less saturated, more saturated.
Lots of things you can do.
Same with the ink lines.
This is the drawing.
If I want to just thicken the lines right away, just boom, double the layers.
That’s just a quick tip that I use quite a bit.
Then merge down.
Cmd+ E. Rock and roll.
Okay, so we touched on brushes.
There is a lot more you can do.
Those are just the basics.
Like I said many times in previous lessons, the basics, of course, are the best.
You’ll be using them every time, any time for the rest, as long as Photoshop exists.
AUTO SCROLL
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AUTO SCROLL
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AUTO SCROLL
Now we’re going to get into the assignment.
The assignment will have two different parts to it or two different, separate assignments.
The first thing is we’re going to learn how to draw and tone from scratch.
What I’m going to have you do is have you draw a skull either from imagination or a
reference if you have your own reference.
Make sure there is good lighting.
You’re going to draw it as if you were drawing on paper using Photoshop.
Then you’re going to add light and shadow and shade just like you would do with traditional
medium.
We’re going to use Photoshop in all the tools that we covered in the lesson.
That’s the first part.
Drawing a skull, lighting and shading.
Okay, so our first assignment, we’re going to draw something and add tone and light and
shadow, so treating this exactly like I was drawing on a piece of paper.
I’m going to show you how to use Photoshop to mimic that process and to make it that
process and to make it smooth and fun.
This first one will be a skull.
I’m going to use a reference.
You can draw from imagination.
You can also use your own picture.
I just chose the skull because I liked them and it’s good practice to draw from memory.
Let’s get started with the first assignment.
Alright, so we make a new canvas.
Let’s get a good size, 8 x 10.
I have the reference, okay, here is my reference.
Make sure it’s untabbed.
I lost my other one.
It’s always under window.
If you lose your windows you can find them under the window file menu.
I’m going to make this a little bit smaller.
You don’t really need to see it.
First I’m going to sketch.
I’m going to sketch and draw.
I’ve already got my brush made.
Instead of drawing on the flat background I always like to make a new layer.
I’m just going to kind of draw, and this drawing brush already has the things I like.
I’m actually drawing it full opacity, but changing the color.
It’s a really light color.
It’s kind of like drawing with a light pencil almost.
Or, lately I like to draw with colored pencils.
They come in very different shades of gray.
It’s kind of like that.
So I’ll just quickly draw my skull.
I’m going to try to draw the rest from memory here.
I’m just going to use the reference for lighting.
I’m not looking, I swear.
I’m drawing from memory, I think.
I’m not going to do a fully rendered skull.
I’m just going to show you the process.
Let’s say, for example, you show this reference, but you want to test out different compositions,
this is where it’s at.
This is probably one of the most useful, I would say if not the most useful thing about
Photoshop is making your own comps.
Making your own comps and adjusting your comps.
That’s what this lesson is all about.
Okay, I had to fine tune that shape a little bit.
Fine tune this shape.
Skulls are so fascinating to me, and they’re a great way to practice head drawing.
Remember the portrait, not the portrait, the little invented head, the little character
I drew from imagination, drawing was a little too intense.
It was a little too, you know, it was just too dark.
I filled in areas that I shouldn’t have.
Now, what I’m going to do is drop the opacity, and to make a new layer this time I’m going
to paint with a darker brush, and I’m going to make it, I’m going to make sure it transfers
on, and then I’m going to make it 80%.
What I want to do is sort of clean up some of the work.
Again, the power of Photoshop is exactly lightbox.
If you’ve ever drawn on a lightbox or an animation table, it’s exactly like that.
I’m just cleaning up my shapes.
I don’t want too many construction lines although I like them.
Actually, I do like them.
But if I wanted to make a more serious looking or realistic looking, I guess, I don’t know.
Let’s make sure some of the shapes look good, the major shapes.
This part is fun.
You’re going to have a lot of fun sketching.
I can already tell.
I remember the first time I played with the computer, I had so much fun, especially if
you have a really good tablet and a pretty strong computer, it’s quite helpful.
Do you see how useful the layer and opacity techniques are?
Very useful.
Okay, yeah, it looks pretty good.
You know, that looks pretty cool.
Instead of deleting that layer, I’m just going to drop the opacity even more.
I like some of that grit and some of that noise.
I don’t know if you can see it now.
It’s super subtle.
Let’s make it like 20% and then I’ll keep this at 100%.
Then merge the two.
I’ll call it drawing or line art, whatever.
Let’s say I want to test the compositional idea.
I might have made a series of thumbnails that I liked.
Let’s say I kind of want to match this background.
Nice chiaroscuro, meaning dark against a dark background, like a Caravaggio.
Let’s try that.
First I’m going to fill the tone like a nice midtone.
Then I’m going to add a little bit of texture with my ugly texture brushes.
We’ll do this in black and white.
And I’m going quickly here.
A lot of these tools we covered already.
What I’m doing is just making a little bit of noise.
Combining techniques to get the noise I want.
I actually want to reverse this.
I want it to go instead of light to dark, reverse opposite light to dark.
I’m just going to take the layer that has the variation, call it variation, call this
VG, and I’m going to rotate it, well, expand it a little bit.
Play with it.
It’s on its own layer.
Okay, you can do that.
Change the direction.
Boom.
Let’s see if I can adjust that.
Get rid of that little line.
Get a little bit of noise and detail and texture, just a little bit.
Normally I would have some really nice brushes.
It’s more fun.
This simulates drawing paper.
I love to draw on toned paper.
Nine out of 10 times I draw on toned paper, and it has a little bit of texture.
Again, simulating traditional.
Okay, so that was my BG.
I’m going to go ahead and merge it.
This was easy to make.
It’s not a big loss.
My drawing is here.
I’ve got a bunch of extra layers for some reason.
Now what I’m going to do is make the flat, boom, boom, boom.
Just draw my, whoops, make sure I’ve got the right lasso active.
I’m just going to quickly block in the silhouette.
Call this flat, and I’m going to fill this with a flat shape.
Let’s say right now it’s at, let’s make it 50 nice and even right down the middle 50%.
You can see some of the old ghost lines showing through.
I don’t like that at all.
What I’m going to do is—I wasn’t expecting that.
What happened is because the lines, remember I started the drawing
with that really light color.
It’s kind of working against me now.
What I’m going to do is make the whole thing black as if it were black.
Instead of dropping the brightness of the color of the marks or making it brighter,
I’m going to drop the opacity.
Eventually, I’m going to paint over the drawing to get a little bit more…
But I like the look of it intact.
It’s just looks cool to me.
Okay, so I got a flat, but flats are flat.
Artists, we don’t like that.
As draftsmen we don’t like that.
We know things must have gradation.
I’m kind of going to treat it like I did the background.
Let’s try that.
There are so many ways to add texture.
There are lots of filters we can use.
I’ve used filters in previous lessons.
I’m just going to bring up this guy.
I actually don’t like this brush at all.
It’s a little bit too, I really have to get my own— make sure the spacing is not enough.
There it is.
There it is, a little bit more spacing.
I’m going to make that more subtle.
Do the reverse for the top.
I’m going to pick a different texture.
Take this lighter one.
It’s not clipped.
That’s why it’s not going outside the bounds.
I’ll save it.
You can change the order, too, of the clip mask.
This one I’m going to do a dissolve.
It gives me a little bit of texture.
It’s a dissolve.
That function is right here under mode.
Little bit of texture and dirt like that.
I normally make a dirt brush.
I have one at home.
One more pass of the dirt, and then make it more subtle by using a clean gradation.
This time a round shape masking it.
Make it even more subtle.
It’s a little too dirty.
Okay, this is perfect.
This is variation, variation.
I have dark variation, light variation, beautiful.
For my flat, boring, I’m just going to mix them—or merge them, excuse me.
Alright.
Now, what I’d like to do is make, just like we started with a flat shape, and then we
add clip mask, gradation, and rendering, for the shape itself I do it also for the shadow.
What I’d like to do is just brush the shadow as if it were a hard-edge shape.
I’m going to try to use this brush.
It’s a little too texture-y.
Let me see…direction, okay.
It’s going to kind of look like a chalky brush.
I’m going to turn transfer off.
I want it to be a little bit opaque.
I’m just going to use a little bit lower.
Well, yeah, actually let me try transfer back on.
Actually, I’ll take that back.
Turn transfer off.
I need it to be hard-edged.
It’s just not the right brush.
So 80% opacity should give me enough subtlety.
What I really want is stuff like that a little bit, kind of like a pencil.
I’m going to pick not so aggressive color to start with pure black.
Right now the base is about 50%, so I’m going to drop it to 25% or so.
I’m going to just start brushing the shadow shapes that I see.
I already started to outline some of them.
Actually, let me go back to 100%.
Remember, we saw what happened when the layer that we clip to isn’t fully opaque.
The effect is very weird.
We don’t want that.
I’m just going to kind of trust in the process there.
Right now my mind is switching to traditional.
As a traditional artist, like, oh, I can’t make the shadow too opaque.
We know when we paint we want to make the shadows generally transparent so they sink
back in the 3D space.
Notice I’m trying to be careful because it’s not clipped.
I didn’t clip it because I wanted to show you what happens when you don’t clip.
Like down here it’s going outside the boundary.
Actually, I do want that a little bit.
I’ll explain that in a second.
That’s kind of the reason why I didn’t clip.
Make sure that eye is nice and tight.
These little smaller shapes, I’m not too worried about.
They’re important but not right now.
We know that when we draw and paint we always want folks on the big shapes first, the big
masses, of course.
We know that.
If you’ve seen other lessons on NMA you’ve probably heard that ad infinitum, to infinity.
Okay, that’s my shadow shape.
It needs some masking.
I’m going to call it shadow.
What I’m going to do is instead of clipping it like that, what I want to do is I want
to make a mask.
The shadow needs to be its own body.
I’m actually, because it’s fully opaque and I like the shape, I’m going to first
make a mask.
And then instead of making a mask I’m just going to delete it.
There are two ways to do that.
Basically, delete the stuff that goes outside the shape that I want to mask.
I can either just do this, just erase, make sure I’m on the layer.
Erase the layer.
Remember, if you see me undoing it’s always CTL + Z to go back.
I can do that or what I can do is merge layers.
I’ll show you that in a minute.
Let me just leave the mask on there for now.
The reason why I do that, why I don’t clip it is because I want the shadow to be its
own entity.
I’m going to clip, boom, boom, boom onto the shadow itself just like we do with the
skull shape.
I’m going to clip on the shadow itself.
The shadow is going to be its own layer or entity that sits above the image.
It’s kind of like imagine a tracing paper on top of your drawing or an animation, another
sheet of animation paper on top of the light table.
Now I need to make a cast shadow so I’m going to zoom out a little bit.
I’m going to do a quick cast shadow so I’m going to make a new layer.
I’m going to call this a shadow too.
I’m going to make a new layer.
I’m going to call this shadow too.
We should call it a cast shadow.
What I’m going to do is draw a marquis just to quickly fill the shape of the table.
That was a circular marquis to draw an oval.
Then paint bucket.
Now, I don’t want it to fill this stuff.
I can either erase it or just mask out.
But, I’ll show you.
Actually, I can do that now.
I can just drop the mask in.
I’m going to adjust the shape of my shadow a little bit.
I don’t want it to be a perfect circle, of course.
I’m going to bring my eraser back.
I’m going to make this a new brush preset.
I’ll just change the shape of the marquis a little bit.
The light is coming from here.
This part will probably not be in shadow even though the table is dark.
Now what I’m going to do is—we actually can’t even see the cast shadow in the reference,
but I’m just putting it there for my own imagination.
I’m just imagining the shape of the cast shadow.
It doesn’t really matter too, too much, actually, the shape of it.
The perspective matters a little bit.
I want to make sure I get the right perspective so it feels like it’s sitting on a table
and not floating in space.
It’s kind of floating in space right now.
Okay, so that’s the cast shadow.
I don’t want it to go inside of our shape.
I’m just going to duplicate this mask.
The easy way to do that—I’m just going to apply a mask.
This mask is already the one I want, so I’m just going to hold ALT and then drag, boom,
drop it in there.
Now it’s inverted.
It’s cutting out stuff I want to keep and keeping the stuff I don’t want.
So, I select the mask and then cmd + I to invert, so now it’s only masking out what’s inside.
It’s nice and clean and sharp.
This one is masked, clean and sharp on the outside.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to combine these two layers.
Select them both.
Hit cmd + E to merge, and what it does is it merges and applies the mask.
Now shadow is on its own entity, see, its own little entity, its own little body.
Of course, what do we do with the shadow.
Just like we would variation, you don’t have to do this step but I just like it.
There are dark parts of the shadow.
You know, there are dark parts of the shadow.
There are lighter parts of the shadow.
We know that.
We look at the reference.
See how the eyes are lighter, the nose is darker.
The occlusion shadow is brighter, so this area is darker.
Go ahead and darken that up.
See how beautiful that looks?
I just love it.
I just love it.
I just love the clip mask.
It never gets old.
When I watch it it’s just so powerful.
Two layers of it because I can because it’s Photoshop.
You can make layers infinitum all day every day.
Just keep making layers until it looks right.
I’ve got to lighten that a little bit.
I’m going to save the darks for the end.
I just wanted to lighten that shadow a little bit.
Actually, I’m going to lighten this whole area a little bit.
I just needed to lighten that part.
I should use airbrush.
I like using texture brush so much I can get a little bit aggressive.
Forgot the occlusion shadow, it gets a little bit darker, we know.
I’m going to lighten the area around the eye socket a little bit, just a little bit,
make it super subtle.
Just use airbrush a little bit in the nose.
This is reflected light coming inside and bouncing around in there.
Drop the opacity, make it more subtle.
Let’s see where else it could go.
I’m just looking for any reason to add variation that doesn’t really belong there on that part.
Okay, so now I’ve got shadow, flat, variation.
That’s pretty good.
Now to quickly add a tone and a highlight, that’s really all we need right.
Actually, I’m going to darken the background.
I’m going to bring up a layer adjustment and just do that just to test it.
I’m liking that.
I’m liking that.
Actually, this can go darker at the bottom, but I’ll do that the top.
I like the new dark background.
I can merge it but I’m just going to leave it as it is.
Now I’m going to go back to the flat layer, and now I can clip it because the shadow is
its own body, its own layer, its own entity.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to do some gradations.
I’m going to go lighter and darker.
Start with a…from the bottom up.
From the side out.
Side plane.
I’m going to mask some of that out.
Looking beautiful, love it.
I’m going to mask some of this out.
Yeah, let me try to mask.
There is a part here that needs to be masked out.
There it is.
Just very subtle.
There is form here.
Typically what I like to do is instead of manually brushing these tones, I like to use
gradients as much as possible, with clip mask, of course.
That way it makes the tones very smooth, and a little bit lighter up top.
This one I’m going to use a combination of dissolve.
I’m just going to pick pure white.
Just go whoop, whoop.
Everywhere I see a little bit of light I’m going to use a dissolve layer.
One more at the bottom.
I’m putting three highlights on three different layers, and I’ll explain that in a minute.
That’s because I want to be able to manipulate them independently of each other.
This bottom one should go really subtle, so I’ll drop the opacity.
This middle one less subtle and the top one, the most brightest, you know, you want that
egg effect, so that’s why three different layers.
Because it was on dissolve mode.
Now I’m going to use smooth gradient, just change the shape a little bit.
I want it to match that highlight there.
Warp it a little bit.
Sort of match the shape, drop the opacity.
I don’t want it to be that bright.
I’m going to brush that in manually.
I just want to set the table for it.
Merge that.
Call it lights.
I’m going to merge these.
I like these.
Apply.
I’m going to call them shadow or dark half tones.
That’s what HT is, half tone.
Let’s see.
Now I’m just going to randomly brush some texture using this brush with some light colored
texture.
This is way too aggressive.
Let me drop the opacity.
I’m still not completely happy with the texture.
I normally have a good texture brush that kind of looks like skull or bone actually
or rock. It’s really cool.
This one will work.
Let’s erase that with another one.
This part isn’t necessary.
You can literally take a picture of bone and use it as a photo texture.
I’d like to do it manually just for fun.
I like that.
It gives it a little bit of texture.
It lightens the value a little bit.
Boom, that’s really the beginning of the render.
Of course, next we know we have to—I’ll quickly do the transition and a little bit
of tones, and then we’ll finish up this demo here.
The transition is simply the transition from shadow to light at the core shadow.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to just pick a nice dark color, make a new layer,
of course.
For this, I’m going to use transfer.
Make sure transfer is on.
I’m going to use some opacity just to get that nice subtle look.
Of course, I could use hue set to fine tune whatever I do at this stage.
This is a lot of fun because to me this is very close to how
I work in a traditional medium.
Basically, I’m just doing the transition tones.
That’s what this step is right here.
It’s the tones that go from core shadow into light.
We know, my painters out there, my draftsmen know what’s up.
They know this step is important.
There are some nice half tones here.
I’m going to use another texture brush.
Really what I’m thinking of is value shapes.
Obviously, I’m working in sort of a dark to light manner.
There are some subtle half tones there.
If I wanted to go even more subtle I can just drop my opacity even more and even change
the color if I want.
I’m going to bring that back.
Bring some of that back there.
I can just take it as far as I want to go now.
I don’t want to take it all the way.
I’ll call this core shadow.
Let’s see, what am I going to do.
I’m going to do this little bit of texture here.
I should probably make a mask, which I will in a second.
Let me draw a selection here.
What I want to do is something like this.
Get those textured tones in the side plane there.
Erase out with another.
Yeah, looks pretty cool.
The edge is cool.
It’s a little too hard.
I’m actually going to merge.
I’m going to make this, drop the opacity, then just merge that so it’s all one layer.
That was my core shadow.
My lights are pretty much there.
What I’m going to do is just add highlights and the fine details now.
Lots of ways to add this highlight.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to draw a lasso.
I’m going to feather it.
Select modify, feather.
Just give it like two pixels.
Drop in the light tone.
Whoops.
There you go.
Then I’m going to erase out.
It doesn’t look as good as I’d like, actually, now that I see it.
Let’s try this.
Yeah, that doesn’t look that good.
That wasn’t a good idea.
That looks okay.
I’m just going to brush it in manually, probably what I should have done earlier.
The edge is a little hard so I’m going to bring up a new brush, airbrush it.
Let’s call this highlight.
That’s what HL means.
Oops, let’s see.
Remember, you can always undo with CTL+ Z.
That erase is too strong.
Okay, now I can just go down the figure or the skull here and add the small highlight shapes.
I’m using a fairly hard-edged brush, but that’s okay because I can always erase.
I can even blur it with a filter if I wanted.
I know, I know, I know these tones are way too bright.
I know.
But, in case you haven’t noticed yet, it really does not matter what you throw down
first because you can always adjust it, and that goes for any operation in Photoshop.
I like to combine a little bit of line.
You can see that I’ve started to add detail.
I can either call up hue set and make it lighter or darker or just drop the opacity.
I think I’m just going to drop the opacity that way it’ll layer on top and add its own noise.
See, you can just layer on top, add its own bit of noise so it looks pretty cool.
When I say noise I mean like fine grain texture detail, so it’s kind of like the bone itself
has that, has its own noise pattern and detail, has little pits and crevices that we can totally
mimic and brush onto our effect.
Alright, so I’m pretty happy with that.
One last thing I want to do to this highlight is put a little bit of a light shape on the
foreground and add a vignette.
I’m just going to add a circular gradient.
I’m going to add the noise pattern.
I need some noise.
So, under mode, dissolve.
This makes a noisy gradation like that.
Then I’m going to do a filter, blur, motion blur.
One of the many blurs we can use.
I don’t like that direction.
That one is okay.
And the drop the opacity.
What I want is that feeling that light is hitting this surface, and I’m going to apply
a gradation to make it a little bit more subtle like that.
Oops, make sure the noise is normal.
Finally, I’m going to put a vignette around the whole thing.
I like vignettes.
So, bring up hue set at the very top so it affects the entire canvas, drop the opacity,
and then we can use gradient tool to unmask or to bring back.
Boom.
Nice little vignette so it looks like a spooky skull in a dark room, kind of like the reference.
Well, that’s it.
That’s the beginning.
Obviously, we need to render, soften edges, and the fine details.
We can just go to town.
But the steps we see here.
This what I found is a very efficient way to do it.
So, that’s the end of this assignment.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Please, please, please practice.
Please review.
I know I went quickly.
Probably by now you’re a pro and all these tools you saw in this lesson and we build
upon previous lessons.
Review this, practice it, and draw your own skull.
Draw something else more simple.
I know skulls are a little hard to draw.
But, as long as you understand the concepts that things go on their own layer, drawings
should go on its own layer.
The tone should get its own layer.
Highlights, shadows should get their own layer.
As long as you understand the power of clip masks, masking, using gradation tools and
selections to fill big areas and playing with your brushes.
You’re going to be a pro.
So, that’s the end of the lesson, and let’s move on to the next assignment.
The assignment will have two different parts to it or two different, separate assignments.
The first thing is we’re going to learn how to draw and tone from scratch.
What I’m going to have you do is have you draw a skull either from imagination or a
reference if you have your own reference.
Make sure there is good lighting.
You’re going to draw it as if you were drawing on paper using Photoshop.
Then you’re going to add light and shadow and shade just like you would do with traditional
medium.
We’re going to use Photoshop in all the tools that we covered in the lesson.
That’s the first part.
Drawing a skull, lighting and shading.
Okay, so our first assignment, we’re going to draw something and add tone and light and
shadow, so treating this exactly like I was drawing on a piece of paper.
I’m going to show you how to use Photoshop to mimic that process and to make it that
process and to make it smooth and fun.
This first one will be a skull.
I’m going to use a reference.
You can draw from imagination.
You can also use your own picture.
I just chose the skull because I liked them and it’s good practice to draw from memory.
Let’s get started with the first assignment.
Alright, so we make a new canvas.
Let’s get a good size, 8 x 10.
I have the reference, okay, here is my reference.
Make sure it’s untabbed.
I lost my other one.
It’s always under window.
If you lose your windows you can find them under the window file menu.
I’m going to make this a little bit smaller.
You don’t really need to see it.
First I’m going to sketch.
I’m going to sketch and draw.
I’ve already got my brush made.
Instead of drawing on the flat background I always like to make a new layer.
I’m just going to kind of draw, and this drawing brush already has the things I like.
I’m actually drawing it full opacity, but changing the color.
It’s a really light color.
It’s kind of like drawing with a light pencil almost.
Or, lately I like to draw with colored pencils.
They come in very different shades of gray.
It’s kind of like that.
So I’ll just quickly draw my skull.
I’m going to try to draw the rest from memory here.
I’m just going to use the reference for lighting.
I’m not looking, I swear.
I’m drawing from memory, I think.
I’m not going to do a fully rendered skull.
I’m just going to show you the process.
Let’s say, for example, you show this reference, but you want to test out different compositions,
this is where it’s at.
This is probably one of the most useful, I would say if not the most useful thing about
Photoshop is making your own comps.
Making your own comps and adjusting your comps.
That’s what this lesson is all about.
Okay, I had to fine tune that shape a little bit.
Fine tune this shape.
Skulls are so fascinating to me, and they’re a great way to practice head drawing.
Remember the portrait, not the portrait, the little invented head, the little character
I drew from imagination, drawing was a little too intense.
It was a little too, you know, it was just too dark.
I filled in areas that I shouldn’t have.
Now, what I’m going to do is drop the opacity, and to make a new layer this time I’m going
to paint with a darker brush, and I’m going to make it, I’m going to make sure it transfers
on, and then I’m going to make it 80%.
What I want to do is sort of clean up some of the work.
Again, the power of Photoshop is exactly lightbox.
If you’ve ever drawn on a lightbox or an animation table, it’s exactly like that.
I’m just cleaning up my shapes.
I don’t want too many construction lines although I like them.
Actually, I do like them.
But if I wanted to make a more serious looking or realistic looking, I guess, I don’t know.
Let’s make sure some of the shapes look good, the major shapes.
This part is fun.
You’re going to have a lot of fun sketching.
I can already tell.
I remember the first time I played with the computer, I had so much fun, especially if
you have a really good tablet and a pretty strong computer, it’s quite helpful.
Do you see how useful the layer and opacity techniques are?
Very useful.
Okay, yeah, it looks pretty good.
You know, that looks pretty cool.
Instead of deleting that layer, I’m just going to drop the opacity even more.
I like some of that grit and some of that noise.
I don’t know if you can see it now.
It’s super subtle.
Let’s make it like 20% and then I’ll keep this at 100%.
Then merge the two.
I’ll call it drawing or line art, whatever.
Let’s say I want to test the compositional idea.
I might have made a series of thumbnails that I liked.
Let’s say I kind of want to match this background.
Nice chiaroscuro, meaning dark against a dark background, like a Caravaggio.
Let’s try that.
First I’m going to fill the tone like a nice midtone.
Then I’m going to add a little bit of texture with my ugly texture brushes.
We’ll do this in black and white.
And I’m going quickly here.
A lot of these tools we covered already.
What I’m doing is just making a little bit of noise.
Combining techniques to get the noise I want.
I actually want to reverse this.
I want it to go instead of light to dark, reverse opposite light to dark.
I’m just going to take the layer that has the variation, call it variation, call this
VG, and I’m going to rotate it, well, expand it a little bit.
Play with it.
It’s on its own layer.
Okay, you can do that.
Change the direction.
Boom.
Let’s see if I can adjust that.
Get rid of that little line.
Get a little bit of noise and detail and texture, just a little bit.
Normally I would have some really nice brushes.
It’s more fun.
This simulates drawing paper.
I love to draw on toned paper.
Nine out of 10 times I draw on toned paper, and it has a little bit of texture.
Again, simulating traditional.
Okay, so that was my BG.
I’m going to go ahead and merge it.
This was easy to make.
It’s not a big loss.
My drawing is here.
I’ve got a bunch of extra layers for some reason.
Now what I’m going to do is make the flat, boom, boom, boom.
Just draw my, whoops, make sure I’ve got the right lasso active.
I’m just going to quickly block in the silhouette.
Call this flat, and I’m going to fill this with a flat shape.
Let’s say right now it’s at, let’s make it 50 nice and even right down the middle 50%.
You can see some of the old ghost lines showing through.
I don’t like that at all.
What I’m going to do is—I wasn’t expecting that.
What happened is because the lines, remember I started the drawing
with that really light color.
It’s kind of working against me now.
What I’m going to do is make the whole thing black as if it were black.
Instead of dropping the brightness of the color of the marks or making it brighter,
I’m going to drop the opacity.
Eventually, I’m going to paint over the drawing to get a little bit more…
But I like the look of it intact.
It’s just looks cool to me.
Okay, so I got a flat, but flats are flat.
Artists, we don’t like that.
As draftsmen we don’t like that.
We know things must have gradation.
I’m kind of going to treat it like I did the background.
Let’s try that.
There are so many ways to add texture.
There are lots of filters we can use.
I’ve used filters in previous lessons.
I’m just going to bring up this guy.
I actually don’t like this brush at all.
It’s a little bit too, I really have to get my own— make sure the spacing is not enough.
There it is.
There it is, a little bit more spacing.
I’m going to make that more subtle.
Do the reverse for the top.
I’m going to pick a different texture.
Take this lighter one.
It’s not clipped.
That’s why it’s not going outside the bounds.
I’ll save it.
You can change the order, too, of the clip mask.
This one I’m going to do a dissolve.
It gives me a little bit of texture.
It’s a dissolve.
That function is right here under mode.
Little bit of texture and dirt like that.
I normally make a dirt brush.
I have one at home.
One more pass of the dirt, and then make it more subtle by using a clean gradation.
This time a round shape masking it.
Make it even more subtle.
It’s a little too dirty.
Okay, this is perfect.
This is variation, variation.
I have dark variation, light variation, beautiful.
For my flat, boring, I’m just going to mix them—or merge them, excuse me.
Alright.
Now, what I’d like to do is make, just like we started with a flat shape, and then we
add clip mask, gradation, and rendering, for the shape itself I do it also for the shadow.
What I’d like to do is just brush the shadow as if it were a hard-edge shape.
I’m going to try to use this brush.
It’s a little too texture-y.
Let me see…direction, okay.
It’s going to kind of look like a chalky brush.
I’m going to turn transfer off.
I want it to be a little bit opaque.
I’m just going to use a little bit lower.
Well, yeah, actually let me try transfer back on.
Actually, I’ll take that back.
Turn transfer off.
I need it to be hard-edged.
It’s just not the right brush.
So 80% opacity should give me enough subtlety.
What I really want is stuff like that a little bit, kind of like a pencil.
I’m going to pick not so aggressive color to start with pure black.
Right now the base is about 50%, so I’m going to drop it to 25% or so.
I’m going to just start brushing the shadow shapes that I see.
I already started to outline some of them.
Actually, let me go back to 100%.
Remember, we saw what happened when the layer that we clip to isn’t fully opaque.
The effect is very weird.
We don’t want that.
I’m just going to kind of trust in the process there.
Right now my mind is switching to traditional.
As a traditional artist, like, oh, I can’t make the shadow too opaque.
We know when we paint we want to make the shadows generally transparent so they sink
back in the 3D space.
Notice I’m trying to be careful because it’s not clipped.
I didn’t clip it because I wanted to show you what happens when you don’t clip.
Like down here it’s going outside the boundary.
Actually, I do want that a little bit.
I’ll explain that in a second.
That’s kind of the reason why I didn’t clip.
Make sure that eye is nice and tight.
These little smaller shapes, I’m not too worried about.
They’re important but not right now.
We know that when we draw and paint we always want folks on the big shapes first, the big
masses, of course.
We know that.
If you’ve seen other lessons on NMA you’ve probably heard that ad infinitum, to infinity.
Okay, that’s my shadow shape.
It needs some masking.
I’m going to call it shadow.
What I’m going to do is instead of clipping it like that, what I want to do is I want
to make a mask.
The shadow needs to be its own body.
I’m actually, because it’s fully opaque and I like the shape, I’m going to first
make a mask.
And then instead of making a mask I’m just going to delete it.
There are two ways to do that.
Basically, delete the stuff that goes outside the shape that I want to mask.
I can either just do this, just erase, make sure I’m on the layer.
Erase the layer.
Remember, if you see me undoing it’s always CTL + Z to go back.
I can do that or what I can do is merge layers.
I’ll show you that in a minute.
Let me just leave the mask on there for now.
The reason why I do that, why I don’t clip it is because I want the shadow to be its
own entity.
I’m going to clip, boom, boom, boom onto the shadow itself just like we do with the
skull shape.
I’m going to clip on the shadow itself.
The shadow is going to be its own layer or entity that sits above the image.
It’s kind of like imagine a tracing paper on top of your drawing or an animation, another
sheet of animation paper on top of the light table.
Now I need to make a cast shadow so I’m going to zoom out a little bit.
I’m going to do a quick cast shadow so I’m going to make a new layer.
I’m going to call this a shadow too.
I’m going to make a new layer.
I’m going to call this shadow too.
We should call it a cast shadow.
What I’m going to do is draw a marquis just to quickly fill the shape of the table.
That was a circular marquis to draw an oval.
Then paint bucket.
Now, I don’t want it to fill this stuff.
I can either erase it or just mask out.
But, I’ll show you.
Actually, I can do that now.
I can just drop the mask in.
I’m going to adjust the shape of my shadow a little bit.
I don’t want it to be a perfect circle, of course.
I’m going to bring my eraser back.
I’m going to make this a new brush preset.
I’ll just change the shape of the marquis a little bit.
The light is coming from here.
This part will probably not be in shadow even though the table is dark.
Now what I’m going to do is—we actually can’t even see the cast shadow in the reference,
but I’m just putting it there for my own imagination.
I’m just imagining the shape of the cast shadow.
It doesn’t really matter too, too much, actually, the shape of it.
The perspective matters a little bit.
I want to make sure I get the right perspective so it feels like it’s sitting on a table
and not floating in space.
It’s kind of floating in space right now.
Okay, so that’s the cast shadow.
I don’t want it to go inside of our shape.
I’m just going to duplicate this mask.
The easy way to do that—I’m just going to apply a mask.
This mask is already the one I want, so I’m just going to hold ALT and then drag, boom,
drop it in there.
Now it’s inverted.
It’s cutting out stuff I want to keep and keeping the stuff I don’t want.
So, I select the mask and then cmd + I to invert, so now it’s only masking out what’s inside.
It’s nice and clean and sharp.
This one is masked, clean and sharp on the outside.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to combine these two layers.
Select them both.
Hit cmd + E to merge, and what it does is it merges and applies the mask.
Now shadow is on its own entity, see, its own little entity, its own little body.
Of course, what do we do with the shadow.
Just like we would variation, you don’t have to do this step but I just like it.
There are dark parts of the shadow.
You know, there are dark parts of the shadow.
There are lighter parts of the shadow.
We know that.
We look at the reference.
See how the eyes are lighter, the nose is darker.
The occlusion shadow is brighter, so this area is darker.
Go ahead and darken that up.
See how beautiful that looks?
I just love it.
I just love it.
I just love the clip mask.
It never gets old.
When I watch it it’s just so powerful.
Two layers of it because I can because it’s Photoshop.
You can make layers infinitum all day every day.
Just keep making layers until it looks right.
I’ve got to lighten that a little bit.
I’m going to save the darks for the end.
I just wanted to lighten that shadow a little bit.
Actually, I’m going to lighten this whole area a little bit.
I just needed to lighten that part.
I should use airbrush.
I like using texture brush so much I can get a little bit aggressive.
Forgot the occlusion shadow, it gets a little bit darker, we know.
I’m going to lighten the area around the eye socket a little bit, just a little bit,
make it super subtle.
Just use airbrush a little bit in the nose.
This is reflected light coming inside and bouncing around in there.
Drop the opacity, make it more subtle.
Let’s see where else it could go.
I’m just looking for any reason to add variation that doesn’t really belong there on that part.
Okay, so now I’ve got shadow, flat, variation.
That’s pretty good.
Now to quickly add a tone and a highlight, that’s really all we need right.
Actually, I’m going to darken the background.
I’m going to bring up a layer adjustment and just do that just to test it.
I’m liking that.
I’m liking that.
Actually, this can go darker at the bottom, but I’ll do that the top.
I like the new dark background.
I can merge it but I’m just going to leave it as it is.
Now I’m going to go back to the flat layer, and now I can clip it because the shadow is
its own body, its own layer, its own entity.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to do some gradations.
I’m going to go lighter and darker.
Start with a…from the bottom up.
From the side out.
Side plane.
I’m going to mask some of that out.
Looking beautiful, love it.
I’m going to mask some of this out.
Yeah, let me try to mask.
There is a part here that needs to be masked out.
There it is.
Just very subtle.
There is form here.
Typically what I like to do is instead of manually brushing these tones, I like to use
gradients as much as possible, with clip mask, of course.
That way it makes the tones very smooth, and a little bit lighter up top.
This one I’m going to use a combination of dissolve.
I’m just going to pick pure white.
Just go whoop, whoop.
Everywhere I see a little bit of light I’m going to use a dissolve layer.
One more at the bottom.
I’m putting three highlights on three different layers, and I’ll explain that in a minute.
That’s because I want to be able to manipulate them independently of each other.
This bottom one should go really subtle, so I’ll drop the opacity.
This middle one less subtle and the top one, the most brightest, you know, you want that
egg effect, so that’s why three different layers.
Because it was on dissolve mode.
Now I’m going to use smooth gradient, just change the shape a little bit.
I want it to match that highlight there.
Warp it a little bit.
Sort of match the shape, drop the opacity.
I don’t want it to be that bright.
I’m going to brush that in manually.
I just want to set the table for it.
Merge that.
Call it lights.
I’m going to merge these.
I like these.
Apply.
I’m going to call them shadow or dark half tones.
That’s what HT is, half tone.
Let’s see.
Now I’m just going to randomly brush some texture using this brush with some light colored
texture.
This is way too aggressive.
Let me drop the opacity.
I’m still not completely happy with the texture.
I normally have a good texture brush that kind of looks like skull or bone actually
or rock. It’s really cool.
This one will work.
Let’s erase that with another one.
This part isn’t necessary.
You can literally take a picture of bone and use it as a photo texture.
I’d like to do it manually just for fun.
I like that.
It gives it a little bit of texture.
It lightens the value a little bit.
Boom, that’s really the beginning of the render.
Of course, next we know we have to—I’ll quickly do the transition and a little bit
of tones, and then we’ll finish up this demo here.
The transition is simply the transition from shadow to light at the core shadow.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to just pick a nice dark color, make a new layer,
of course.
For this, I’m going to use transfer.
Make sure transfer is on.
I’m going to use some opacity just to get that nice subtle look.
Of course, I could use hue set to fine tune whatever I do at this stage.
This is a lot of fun because to me this is very close to how
I work in a traditional medium.
Basically, I’m just doing the transition tones.
That’s what this step is right here.
It’s the tones that go from core shadow into light.
We know, my painters out there, my draftsmen know what’s up.
They know this step is important.
There are some nice half tones here.
I’m going to use another texture brush.
Really what I’m thinking of is value shapes.
Obviously, I’m working in sort of a dark to light manner.
There are some subtle half tones there.
If I wanted to go even more subtle I can just drop my opacity even more and even change
the color if I want.
I’m going to bring that back.
Bring some of that back there.
I can just take it as far as I want to go now.
I don’t want to take it all the way.
I’ll call this core shadow.
Let’s see, what am I going to do.
I’m going to do this little bit of texture here.
I should probably make a mask, which I will in a second.
Let me draw a selection here.
What I want to do is something like this.
Get those textured tones in the side plane there.
Erase out with another.
Yeah, looks pretty cool.
The edge is cool.
It’s a little too hard.
I’m actually going to merge.
I’m going to make this, drop the opacity, then just merge that so it’s all one layer.
That was my core shadow.
My lights are pretty much there.
What I’m going to do is just add highlights and the fine details now.
Lots of ways to add this highlight.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to draw a lasso.
I’m going to feather it.
Select modify, feather.
Just give it like two pixels.
Drop in the light tone.
Whoops.
There you go.
Then I’m going to erase out.
It doesn’t look as good as I’d like, actually, now that I see it.
Let’s try this.
Yeah, that doesn’t look that good.
That wasn’t a good idea.
That looks okay.
I’m just going to brush it in manually, probably what I should have done earlier.
The edge is a little hard so I’m going to bring up a new brush, airbrush it.
Let’s call this highlight.
That’s what HL means.
Oops, let’s see.
Remember, you can always undo with CTL+ Z.
That erase is too strong.
Okay, now I can just go down the figure or the skull here and add the small highlight shapes.
I’m using a fairly hard-edged brush, but that’s okay because I can always erase.
I can even blur it with a filter if I wanted.
I know, I know, I know these tones are way too bright.
I know.
But, in case you haven’t noticed yet, it really does not matter what you throw down
first because you can always adjust it, and that goes for any operation in Photoshop.
I like to combine a little bit of line.
You can see that I’ve started to add detail.
I can either call up hue set and make it lighter or darker or just drop the opacity.
I think I’m just going to drop the opacity that way it’ll layer on top and add its own noise.
See, you can just layer on top, add its own bit of noise so it looks pretty cool.
When I say noise I mean like fine grain texture detail, so it’s kind of like the bone itself
has that, has its own noise pattern and detail, has little pits and crevices that we can totally
mimic and brush onto our effect.
Alright, so I’m pretty happy with that.
One last thing I want to do to this highlight is put a little bit of a light shape on the
foreground and add a vignette.
I’m just going to add a circular gradient.
I’m going to add the noise pattern.
I need some noise.
So, under mode, dissolve.
This makes a noisy gradation like that.
Then I’m going to do a filter, blur, motion blur.
One of the many blurs we can use.
I don’t like that direction.
That one is okay.
And the drop the opacity.
What I want is that feeling that light is hitting this surface, and I’m going to apply
a gradation to make it a little bit more subtle like that.
Oops, make sure the noise is normal.
Finally, I’m going to put a vignette around the whole thing.
I like vignettes.
So, bring up hue set at the very top so it affects the entire canvas, drop the opacity,
and then we can use gradient tool to unmask or to bring back.
Boom.
Nice little vignette so it looks like a spooky skull in a dark room, kind of like the reference.
Well, that’s it.
That’s the beginning.
Obviously, we need to render, soften edges, and the fine details.
We can just go to town.
But the steps we see here.
This what I found is a very efficient way to do it.
So, that’s the end of this assignment.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Please, please, please practice.
Please review.
I know I went quickly.
Probably by now you’re a pro and all these tools you saw in this lesson and we build
upon previous lessons.
Review this, practice it, and draw your own skull.
Draw something else more simple.
I know skulls are a little hard to draw.
But, as long as you understand the concepts that things go on their own layer, drawings
should go on its own layer.
The tone should get its own layer.
Highlights, shadows should get their own layer.
As long as you understand the power of clip masks, masking, using gradation tools and
selections to fill big areas and playing with your brushes.
You’re going to be a pro.
So, that’s the end of the lesson, and let’s move on to the next assignment.
AUTO SCROLL
The second part, this is going to be a little interesting as well.
What we’re going to do here is we’re going to learn how to light and shade and render
a drawing that we did on paper.
So here, we’re going to take a drawing that we did on a piece of paper or in our sketchbook,
scan it into Photoshop, bring it into the computer and bring it into Photoshop.
Then I’m going to show you how to quickly add tone, how to set up your layers, and you’re
going to make the comp really beautiful, a black and white tonal comp, and then you’re
going to quickly make three different versions so you can compare.
That way, if you want to make a longer painting or drawing you have a beautiful composition
ready for you to go.
That’s the overview of the assignment.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Get your tablet and let’s begin.
Okay, in this second assignment, we’re going to use Photoshop to create comps based on
a drawing.
We’re going old school here.
What we’re going to do is take a drawing that we drew on paper, scan it into the computer.
We’re going to bring it into Photoshop and create three different comps using Photoshop
to add all the value and all the shading.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
It’s very old school.
If you’re like me and you also love to draw and you love to shade, this is going to be
a really great and fun assignment for you.
Let’s get started.
Alright, what I’m going to do first is bring in the drawing that I already scanned here.
Okay, here you go.
This is—you might recognize it as a character from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
It’s an Ang Lee film that came out a few years ago but has wonderful cinematography.
I really enjoyed the photography.
It has wonderful characters.
What I’m going to do is take this drawing.
I’m going to create three different comps.
Let’s say I wanted to make a larger scale painting or maybe a more finished drawing.
What I want to do first, of course, is decide on the composition,
specifically the value composition.
You know, whether we want mostly darks, lights, whatever.
Photoshop is the perfect tool for doing that.
Let’s get started by first blocking in some shapes.
This scan is pretty big.
It’s pretty high risk and 300 dpi and, of course, set to tif.
What I’m going to do is make a new file first.
Just like we saw in previous examples, I’m going to make myself
three different thumbnails.
I’m going to first grab the drawing.
There are a couple ways to do this.
Here I’m going to just take the drawing, draw a marquis around it because I don’t
need all this white space.
It really doesn’t matter at this stage.
I’m just going to kind of drag it in there.
You can do that with a marquis or you can just, if there is no marquis and you just
want to grab the drawing and get started, what I do is I grab the layer itself and manually
drag it into the new document like that.
Or you can do cut and paste, CTL + A, CTL + C, that kind of thing.
I tend to just like to drag it in the document.
This looks pretty good.
That’s pretty big.
I’m going to shrink it down.
What I want to do is be able to fit three of these on one page, on one 8 x 10 sheet
so that I can print it out.
What I can do is start big with one and then reduce it in size.
So, first I’d like to make a, what do you call that?
A nice little frame so I know what the composition will be, and let’s see,
I’m going to drop the opacity.
What I want to do, this is too dark.
What I want to do is just take this background and kind of give myself a nice crop.
That’s the word I’m looking for.
I’d like to get the right crop that I want.
Once I have the right crop, I can apply it to the drawing.
Then I can either make a mask around the drawing, which I’m going to do here.
I want to eliminate all that other stuff.
Now, to make use of this drawing, meaning, what we’re going to do is we’re going
to keep the drawing untouched as its own layer, but we’re going to add the tones underneath
it on separate layers.
The quickest way to do that is to set it to multiply.
Right now it’s set to normal mode.
The drawing is on its own layer.
It’s surrounded by—let me show you.
If I turn the canvas black you can see the drawing is surrounded by white.
It was scanned on a sheet of paper.
First I’m going to turn it to multiply.
What multiply does is it eliminates the white of the paper, and all you can see is the darks.
It’s a great way if you scan a pencil drawing like this, it’s a great way to be able to
preserve your pencil drawing and use it as if you were toning with markers.
This is a very similar approach to using marker or perhaps watercolor where you would draw
on your paper or your board and then add the tones and the drawing is still preserved.
This works a lot like that.
Now, it’s set to multiplying.
I’m going to name it drawing.
Then I’m going to name the flat or BG.
It’s called BG.
I’m going to—first, let’s make the BG about 50%.
It’s a nice even midtone.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to add some tone to my character.
Let me make it 75%.
It’s a little easier for me to see.
Now I’m going to draw tones.
First I need a mask, of course.
Let’s see if I can use the magic wand.
What I really want to do is draw a mask around her silhouette so I can use all the clipping
masks and things. So, let’s see.
If magic wand is able to grab ahold—okay, in this case, it’s not working.
It’s not problem.
I’m going to have to draw a mask manually.
It’s not biggie.
We’ve done that many times.
Remember, I just typically like to draw a big crude mask sort of like this and then
fine tune it as I go.
Here I’m holding ALT.
Remember, if you get a little confused about this step, this was reviewed.
You can review the previous lessons on selections.
It’s such a powerful tool.
Basically, if you want to refine or modify your selection you hold ALT to cut in like
I’m doing.
You see the minus sign.
If you wanted to add you hold SHIFT and you see the plus sign.
In this case, all I’m doing is subtracting or cutting out, cutting into the selection
I already drew using the rectangular lasso tool.
It just gives me a lot of control.
Personally, I draw with a lot of straights as you may be noticing, a lot of straights here.
That’s just a personal taste in aesthetics.
This sword has a very unique curve to it.
I almost want to use the pen tool.
The pen tool gives you the ability to create beautiful long curves like this, the kind
of curves that are like a nightmare to draw by hand.
Let’s see, just cut it back in here.
For this one, I’m not going to render, per se, so we don’t have to worry too much about
the pencil line, how deep I cut into the pencil line.
It’s just going to be real basic.
For this one, let’s see if I could cut this out.
Notice I want to cut this out quickly, so I grab the magic wand and I hold ALT.
Notice, again, it turns to minus and then cut in.
Boom.
That’s pretty good.
That’s a pretty good cut.
See that?
Cut that space out because I held the minus key.
That was the magic wand tool.
In this case it worked because the silhouette was drawn fairly tight.
That should do it, I think, for a nice little mask.
Of course, I can modify the mask at any time.
Now that I’ve got a mask, I’ve got to make a new layer.
We’ll call it flat.
Then baboom.
We don’t want it pure black, of course.
Hue set and if you want precision, I’m just going to go to 50.
Nice and even, boom.
The flat is bigger than my boundary.
What I’m going to do here—actually, what I’m going to do is also make a frame.
There are a couple of ways to make a frame.
Yeah, what I think I want to do, let’s just lighten this up a little bit.
I need to cut this and draw, I’m basically trying to draw a black border
around the whole thing.
So, let’s see.
Let’s take this.
This is an object.
Put this on top.
I’m going to drop the fill.
This is a vector object, shape.
Remember, if you drop the fill to zero you can still have a nice clean stroke.
There you go, 24 pix.
That seems pretty good.
Let’s try 30 pix.
Oh, that seems better but it’s a little too tight so I have to expand it.
Let’s see.
I just want to make sure that because I set the stroke to inner instead of outer because
I wanted that clean tight edge.
Remember, if you set the stroke to outer you’ll get a curved edge.
So now that’s a pretty nice frame.
I’m liking that.
But, I want this to be cut off.
What I’m going to do is I can either apply a mask to all of this.
Or what I can do is make a folder.
I’m going to make a folder.
I’m going to make a group.
I’m selecting all, cmd + G.
If you have a bunch of layers selected it creates a group.
Then what I’m going to do is just call it layers.
All of my artwork will be in this layer in this folder.
Then I’m going to put a mask on this.
Now, everything in this folder will be in this mask, within this tight shape.
Now I don’t have to worry about going outside.
For example, I can just go like that, right, and it stays locked in.
My stroke or the frame, the black borders are at the top.
I’m going to call it frame just so I know what it is.
Now I’m good to go.
That was the setup.
It kind of went forward and backwards but that’s okay.
There are 500 ways to do the same thing.
That’s why I always kind of skip around and don’t always follow total linear logic.
Essentially, the steps are all the same.
The next stage is the shadow block in so I’m going to get myself a fairly nice dark midtone.
Let’s set this to 80.
Now I’ve got to decide how much of her will be in dark shadow.
It’s not, the lighting wasn’t ideal.
I don’t even know if this will be a good step, to be honest with you.
Typically, if I have a beautiful, clean shadow, I will almost always do this step.
But for this one, the shadow wasn’t that tight, as you can see.
It was kind of all over the place.
I forgot to clip it there.
Actually, you know, I’m going to call this layer darks.
These are my dark shadows.
Right now it’s set to 80% opacity, so it gives me a little bit of softness.
Not too much.
Let’s see here.
What I’m trying to do is give myself a nice, clean dark shadow shape and a little bit of
subtle tones there.
It’s not the cleanest, most uniform, most contrast-y shadow, but this is fine
for what I have to do.
Just adding tone where I feel that it needs it.
I’m using the same values, fairly dark value, but a soft airbrush this time.
You can see how beautiful the multiply layer is working.
The drawing is showing through.
Right now it’s beautiful so you’re getting some of the value and tone from the drawing
already.
Okay, so we’ll call this darks.
This one I probably won’t need to add variation or anything, so I’m going to go ahead and
mask it right there.
That way I don’t need to clip it.
So, for the flats, I’m going to go ahead and mask it.
I’m going to go ahead and give it some variation.
That’s what I meant to say.
I’m going to go from bottom up.
I am imagining the light source is upper left or straight up.
I’m going to go from the bottom left there.
Let’s see what else I can do.
That was just a general pass.
It looks really nice.
I’m going to do a lighter pass using the gradient tool.
We’re going to clip that as well.
I want to see what happens if I expand that a little bit.
I want that feeling that light is coming from above.
It looks really nice so far.
So, I like that so far.
It’s a little too contrast-y.
What I’m going to do is mask out the areas that should be dark, like the sockets.
I think that’s the problem with that highlight.
It’s washing out my lights a little too much or my darks a little too much.
I don’t really want that.
Okay, it’s good.
Drop it a little bit more.
That’s good.
It’s perfect.
Call it variation.
Let’s see what’s next.
What I’d like to do is get a subtle gradation just on this outfit so I’m going to mask it out.
See that?
Yeah, beautiful.
I work in a traditional
So, a little bit darker there.
I also want to do it here at the arm.
I’m masking out this section because I don’t
want to affect this section or really anything else.
That’s why I’m going to use a mask because I like to use the gradient tool so you see
that beautiful gradient that happened there.
Whoops, I should probably put in another layer.
Always try to put things on a new layer.
That way I could always adjust each operation and fine tune it.
Then if I’m happy with it I can merge down.
One more pass, right here.
Maybe a couple of more passes.
I just want to affect this shirt thing or sleeve there.
It’s going bottom up and inside out.
That one is a little too, oops, a little too aggressive up top.
I’m basically doing some really quick washes of tone.
You may notice that it feels like tone, so now I have my darks and my mids but no light.
So first I’m going to put a light here, but let me darken the backgrounds.
This is one of my first decisions, and there are a bunch of ways to do this.
I like gradient tools so much.
Let me just try that.
Let me just darken the background.
Then I’m going to clip it and then maybe add some texture at the bottom.
Let’s see what that looks like.
I don’t know.
I’m not quite sure how light I want it to be.
You know, you don’t have to use a brush like that.
You could have just slapped on a gradient.
It would have worked just as well.
I just wanted to see what it looked like with a little bit of texture.
That’s one of the things I could use this step for, of course, is to figure out does
textured background than a soft quiet background like that.
I’m not sure.
I guess we’re going to find out.
Let’s try it this tall.
I kind of like that grainy look.
That looks kind of cool.
Let’s see if we can blur it.
Filter, blur.
Let’s try motion blur.
Let’s clip that.
Then we’ll add a mask.
I’m just trying a bunch of different things right now.
So, this feels pretty good.
It feels like a pretty good start.
Let me get a little more.
I’m still not quite happy with the value there.
Let me get a little bit more, oops, let me just focus on the value for now.
Alright, let’s do that.
That’s more of a chiaroscuro, I like that much better actually.
Ok, good, let’s settle on that as a background.
Now you can see the mask right here isn’t that clean.
Let me clean that up.
This is all this noise, a little disturbing.
All I have to do is tighten up the mask.
That was, remember here we used the wand tool, magic wand to quickly select this area.
But sometimes the tools you still need to do some cleanup work.
That’s okay.
They get us almost all the way there.
That’s what the tools and shortcuts there.
They kind of get you in the ballpark, and then from there you can take over and fine
tune it, refine it.
Polish it.
Okay, let’s see.
Looks pretty good.
Let’s see if I can clean up this sword a little bit.
That’s why I think I should have used a curve here.
The pixelatedness is alright.
Notice I’m using erase so I have to be a little bit careful, versus using a mask.
I know I say using a mask is a little bit more, little bit safer for sure, but I think
it’s more, it’s a smarter way to work.
I’m just being a little lazy here.
Okay, so the mask is pretty tight.
Let me get some tone on her hair.
We’ll call these darks.
Oh now, these are the darks.
What are these?
Are these darks too?
Okay.
That’s too harsh.
I wanted to make sure I put that separate layer right there.
Just clean up that little bit of dark around her hair.
If I want to put a rim light there, of course, I can do that later.
Alright, so now I’m set up.
Call it BG tone.
Now I’m set up to do the lights.
I needed some value in the background because right now it’s surrounded by fairly light
value, 75% gray, so I won’t be able to judge them correctly until I do this.
Now I have a choice.
Let’s see, should I put the brightest bright on the sword?
I believe in the reference it’s on the sword.
This is not clean.
Or, should I put the brightest bright on the…
also, guys, you might be noticing that I rotate the canvas.
In this version of Photoshop it’s with the R key.
But, you know, you could also just do your, remember flip canvas hot keys.
They work pretty well, too, but the R gives you this arbitrary rotation.
Just click R and to get out of rotation mode just hit escape.
Then back to normal.
Okay, so this part is a little tricky because—well, it’s not tricky.
Everything you see me do we’ve already done, but it’s the order that’s tricky.
Right now my mind is like, well, should I do this?
Should I do this?
The order kind of really doesn’t matter.
We’re basically doing a sketch thumbnail.
It’s kind of what we’re doing here.
You know, we’re not doing anything finished or rendering.
And also, Photoshop there literally are 50 ways, there are probably a 100 different ways
we could have done what you just saw.
It may feel like I’m skipping steps, doing this, which I am, but don’t worry so much
about the order.
Just pay attention to the tools that we’ve already covered.
Lassos, layering, adjustments, gradations, clips, clip masks, all the stuff we covered.
I’m just using the basic tools, but you’ve just seen me do it
in a slightly different sequence.
Now we’re almost done with the setup.
What I’m doing here is setting up so that we can quickly have the setup, the layers,
the masks ready to do quick and easy variations.
Once I have this setup, once I have the layers set up the way that we need we can quickly
make boom, boom, boom, three different versions.
Just be patient a little bit here.
With practice you’ll be able to come up with your own way.
Right now you’re just watching me do it the way that I’m comfortable with, the way
that I think is the most efficient, but the sequence is kind of jumbled.
Don’t worry about that.
We’re almost done with the setup mode.
The last thing I need is light.
Alright, let’s set up the lights.
Alright, let’s set up the lights.
What I’m going to do is, let me try this real quick.
Let me just try this.
I’m going to make a layer.
I’m just going to copy.
I’m going to make it a layer, clip it, call it lights.
I’m going to start, I know it has an I. I know lights has an I. I know there is a
highlight in her face, I know that much.
Let’s try that.
It looks pretty good.
Let me adjust the temperature, or not temperature, the brightness.
I was skipping ahead to the painting lesson.
I want to make sure you guys come back for the color lesson next time.
Let’s do a couple of more.
Using all gradation tool because it’s just such a beautiful and soft way to work.
My brush work can be like 50/50.
Sometimes it looks okay.
Sometimes it looks like total crap.
I really like the gradient tool for this reason.
Because I have unlimited layers I can make as many layers as I need and crop and edit
and do all this good stuff that I like to do.
I saw three pieces there, the cheek, the nose, and the forehead, all three different layers.
I’m just going to merge them.
I’m pretty happy with what I got, and it didn’t preserve the thing.
Typically, it can preserve the—now I’m doing some manual brushing here.
I want to give her some highlights here.
Put that little highlight on her shield there.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to put the bright highlight
on this area, the sword blade.
I don’t have to do.
I’m just going to make a comp and test it.
That’s the beauty of Photoshop.
I’m just testing a theory that the highlight, the brightest spot on the sword will look
pretty good, will look the best, I don’t know.
You don’t know until you try it out.
Test the theory.
That’s what a thumbnail is.
You’re creating a theory that my picture will look better if I do X, Y, and Z.
I want to do this in a couple of layers.
I know it’s a sloppy mask.
I’ll do this in a couple of layers.
Actually, let me include the sword.
I don’t need to mask the actual blade because it’s already clipped.
I do need to mask where the blade intersects with her body, overlaps her body, like this area.
I want that to be fairly tight because what I’m going to do now will only affect the
blade itself.
I’m going to make a new layer.
Put this guy on it.
This is the mask for the blade itself.
Then I’m going to start with pure white.
I’m just going to do reflective gradient.
Perfected the mask.
What I’m going to do is draw a marquis around this area because when you do reflective gradient
it—this one needs to be clipped first.
Okay, there you go.
Reflective gradient you can change the angle very quickly just by rotating it.
That’s one of the features I love about gradation tool.
Combine it with layers, it’s just so, so powerful.
This is like a general glow on the sword there, which I’m loving right now.
I’m loving it.
I wish—actually, I’m going to make a new mask.
It’s not masking correctly.
The effect I want isn’t masking correctly.
Now I just need the mask of the sword itself and the handle there.
Again, you’re seeing me do the sequence kind of jumbled here,
but the tools are all the same.
Okay, now I got a nice, tight mask.
Is it a tight mask, though?
Not really.
There we go.
Awesome.
Okay, so now I’ve got a really tight mask.
I’m going to delete this guy.
Delete.
Do you see how it went over?
Now I’m going to call this sword.
Alright, here we go.
I’ll call this lights.
Sword.
Alright, soon you will see why I’m going through this much trouble once these layers
are set up correctly.
You’ll see the benefit of doing it this way.
There is one more thing I want to add there which is right here.
This one feels a little flat.
You saw it transform the mask as well.
That’s what you were seeing there.
They were linked.
Now they’re unlinked so I’m able to transform the layer by itself.
Go one more time.
Whenever you see me make a new move, I’m pretty much always doing this: making a new
layer and then using the set of options that I have to modify and fine tune it.
There you go.
Preserve.
I’m going to delete where it goes inside the, or erase.
I still don’t like how this hand is looking.
It does need a little bit of light there but not too much.
Just some more aggressive manual brushing.
Anyway, let’s get back to the sword.
I’m going to drop that, what I just did, because I want a bright, bright highlight
right down the middle so I’m going to make a new layer, duplicate the mask by holding
ALT and dragging.
Now I’m going to make a marquis because I don’t want the gradient to spill all over
the canvas, which may be hard to rotate, make it very hard to rotate.
So now I’m just going to slap it on there.
That looks pretty good.
What I can even do is drag this layer above the drawing.
See what happens there.
Now it looks really, really bright.
I wish I could do that one more time, probably.
I should keep doing that.
Probably draw another marquis.
Let’s try that just for fun.
Let’s see.
The blade handle will have its own—so, I’m going to make a folder.
I’m going to put the mask of the blade in the folder, and within that folder I’m going
to put a layer, an empty layer.
I’m going to put the mass that I just drew so now I can affect only the part of the blade,
but the folder masks out the blade itself.
So I’m basically using two masks at once.
Then I can do that.
Yes!
See that?
It only affects the area that I drew, but it also stays locked into the blade.
It’s sort of a double mask technique.
I’m going to clean up that edge.
It’s way to funky and hard.
I can do it here.
Just clean up the mask.
Again, using the option to clean up my work and lower the opacity a little bit.
Yeah, it feels okay.
I can move it.
It’s still active.
It’s still a mask.
I can kind of move it around to see what I like best.
I can rotate it.
See how it might look best.
I think that looks pretty good right there.
Now what I’m going to do is merge all of this work that I just did into this layer.
I kind of want it to preserve the sword.
There we go.
I merged the group, and I hit merge down and it preserved the layer.
I’m going to do a little bit of subtle erasing right here just on that part.
Yeah.
Too subtle there.
Okay, now I’ve got a nice comp.
Now I finally have a comp.
Now, in this comp my darks are pretty much around her, her dark accents.
Midtones are her outfit, her skin.
The lights are some of the lights on her skin and also the brightest highlight here is on
the sword and also on the handle.
It’s like a two-value system.
I can even do this.
One more thing.
Just for fun I have a brush that creates a bling effect.
I like that.
That way you know, okay, there is the brightest highlight.
Let’s drop the opacity a little bit.
So, I like that comp.
I’m going to call this comp 1.
I’m going to save this as comp dash demo.
Great.
Let’s try a couple of different versions.
What if the one obvious example is what if I want the brightest highlight on her?
Let’s try that.
Very easy.
I’m going to duplicate my work.
Call this comp 2, and I’m going to move comp 1 above and move comp 2, just drag it
and slide it down.
Oh, it didn’t copy the layer or the mask.
Oh, I forgot to put the frames.
I forgot to include the frame.
This is the layers.
This is the frame.
I need them both.
I’m going to put the frames and the layers folder, select them both, cmd + G,
call up a new folder. Call this comp 1.
Now, inside the folder I have the frame and all the layers with the mask.
It keeps it nice and tight.
Okay, now I can duplicate this.
Call this comp 2.
I’m going to change the order.
Move it don because this one will go below it.
I don’t have to do that.
I just know that 1 is at the top, 2 is on the bottom.
They’ll be a third one, which we’ll have to adjust the size in a minute.
Now, we’ve got all the layers that we need.
Let’s say I don’t like that sparkle.
I don’t like all that sword highlight, all that stuff.
I like the highlights.
What if I want to put the brightest highlight on her face.
Let’s say I keep the sword but the sword is toned down?
But, I want the brightest highlight on her face,
and I want to put that above the drawing, actually.
Now I’m going to use pure Photoshop drawing, toning here.
I’m not using any tools, just using the pen.
I’m just going to add the highlights where I think they belong.
A little bit of highlight on her shirt there.
Little bit more highlight on the top plane of her costume there.
That looks pretty good.
Then what I’m going to do is I’m going to intentionally brighten her.
Let’s see, I’m just going to make her brighter.
I’m pretty much going to make the world brighter too.
Oh, I like that.
I just lowered the opacity, really, of that.
Do you see how powerful the layering system is, now you’re starting to see, oh, that’s
why he did all that damn work.
Now I can do this.
Let me change the brightness.
Remember, all this tonal work we did it right here in the beginning.
I can either drop the opacity, or I can do a combination of both lightening it.
I just want to see what it looks like if she’s brighter.
I kind of erase this out, this little extra bit of darkness that I did there.
Now, she’s a little bit brighter, a little bit brighter all over.
A lot of the attention is on her face now because the brightest highlight is there.
You may want that.
You may not.
Adding a little bit of texture.
This is kind of cool now.
It’s kind of like hatching.
It’s exactly what I would on paper.
I’m just adding a few more highlights down here just to see what it looked like.
Of course, I can do that because it’s a comp.
I think that’s starting to look pretty nice, actually.
Wow.
I don’t know, what do you guys think at home?
I’m comparing these two, and it’s looking like the bottom one looks pretty good, huh?
Okay.
That’s it.
That’s my third comp.
I wanted to test two things: if the highlight looked better on her than the sword, and if
the background should be lighter her outfit should be lighter.
Let’s try one more comp.
I don’t think I need that anymore.
I don’t need that anymore.
We’ll call this highlights.
And it’s above the drawing so I don’t care if it goes outside the borders of the mask.
Yeah, it looks pretty good.
Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy this one again, just click hold and drag.
Call it comp 3.
Should we go down or to the right?
Let’s go to the right.
That way you guys can see.
I’m just going to expand my canvas.
I used the crop tool.
Sorry, you may not have seen that.
That’s one way to expand the canvas.
Let me undo that.
I just take the crop tool.
The shortcut is C. Select the whole canvas and then drag it.
You can crop it by going smaller, of course.
You can also drag it to go bigger.
I’m just going to drag it to about double the size.
Remember, we also can do that with canvas size.
Now I need to correct the gap, this black space.
I just selected the tone that I put there on a new layer.
Now I’ve got a bigger canvas.
Now I’m just going to drag comp 3 to the right so now we can see.
We can actually make four comps now.
Okay, so what’s one more combination we can try?
What if make her—let’s make her super dark.
This is kind of like a low key, high key, mid key.
We can make a flatter one.
I’m not quite sure what to do here, what kind of combination.
Let’s try a different background idea.
Let’s try a different background.
Let’s just try that because we can.
So, we’ve got my layers.
Take the background tone and what I’m going to do first is,
I kind of like this darkness to it.
Let’s just see what it looks like if we add texture.
Let’s try that.
Texture and…
I’m going to put that on its own layer.
All these custom brushes are just quick ways to make texture.
Okay, BG texture.
Let’s see.
It looks nice when it’s really dark, actually.
Let me try this.
I like the texture so I’m just going to see, put on a hue set, see if it looks good
when it’s—ooh, it does look pretty good when it’s darker.
I like that.
I like that.
I’m just going to go ahead and put that together, just merge it down with the work
that I had.
Then I’m going to try one more thing.
I want that beam of light to expand kind of past her a little bit.
I’m going to make a circular gradient with dissolve.
Change it to like pure bright white.
Now we know that’s too bright.
It doesn’t really matter.
Because it’s on its own layer, you can change the shape as much as a I want.
Now I’m going go to do a filter.
Actually, let me cut into it a little bit here.
By cut into it, I mean let me see if I can erase out of it and randomize it a little bit.
I’m going to apply a filter and see what that does.
Filter, blur, motion blur.
They would all do cool and interesting things.
This might not be the right texture for this.
Well, it was worth a try.
I don’t know, I kind of like that.
It’s a little bit peeking behind her.
Yeah, let’s leave it like that for now.
Just leave it at that for now.
Now it’s too dark or it’s too bright.
Okay, that’s better.
It’s just a little too dark, too bright, excuse me.
Okay, so a textured background.
Right away I don’t like—it doesn’t look as good as this one.
Let me make it a little bit more subtle.
Wipe this off.
Okay, that’s okay.
Still not happy with it, but let’s move on here.
What other variations can I try?
Let’s see.
This looks okay with a really dark background.
Let’s see if we can make our lower forms a little bit brighter.
Let’s add some more light to these lower forms.
Let’s see, highlight, let’s keep that.
Make a layer right above lights.
Oops, let’s just start to see what we can get here.
What I want to see is if it looks good to bring out these forms, meaning make them catch
some light here.
It’s what I’m doing here.
Right away I’m not liking this as much as the previous one.
Just the brush works looks a little sloppy.
I think just compositionally it’s not as strong.
Nice bright contrast, that nice contrast between the darks and the lights up top, it has a
nice feeling of fall off.
Hmm, it looks okay.
Yeah, it looks okay.
Take that gradient a little bit over here.
It looks okay.
Now I’m not liking the background.
Let’s keep things simple here.
What I’m going to do is make a plain old dark background, and I’m going to give this
one a little bit of noise.
I’m just going to make a new layer.
This is pure black here.
It’s a little bit of texture and noise.
That way it’s not super flat and dark.
Let’s drop the opacity there, just make it more subtle.
Now I have some texture.
Let me make some—there you go.
I just want that texture to be really subtle.
Now I’m going to do a—let’s try this.
Let’s try this.
I’m going to make a nice hot spot.
Ooh, that looks pretty good.
It looks pretty good.
It’s really dramatic.
It’s like a poster, almost.
Like a movie poster, I like that.
That was just kind of an accident.
I was hoping for this splatter brush, actually.
This kind of random and organic, which is good and bad.
It’s good because it is random.
You have very little control over it.
When you touch it down it kind of looks different, kind of like that, just make it subtle.
Yes, I’m liking this.
I’m glad I tried it.
You’ll see me struggle through it.
Ooh, I like that.
So, in this case, yeah, we have a dark background with this cool mystical effect on her.
What I can even do is try this.
Let’s try this.
I’m going to take her lights.
Let’s see what happens.
I’m going to duplicate this, the lights.
In case I don’t like what I’m about to do, I can bring back the original.
Turn down the lights here on her face even more.
I’m kind of liking that.
What I’m trying to do is get, let’s see if I can get a hard, hard highlight on her
and have this one go above the pencil line so it’s really, really bright.
Now there is like a nice, specular highlight.
Specular just means it’s more reflective.
Let’s say her skin is a little bit oily or has moisture on it, sweat.
Things become much more reflective.
So, don’t worry about what it’s called.
Just know that, hey, you’re making a comp, and you’ve got to make your comp look good.
Sometimes your highlights have to go really hard.
I’m going to try a different tool.
I’m going to use gradient tool.
Like that.
Alright, now she has some specular highlights.
A little bit different than down here.
I kind of like that.
Let me add some more spec highlights.
This makes it feel like very movie poster-y, which I’m loving that look.
Do you know what I mean?
It looks very dramatic.
I’m loving it.
Then one last thing I want to try is texture.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to make a mask.
I’m going to put this above.
These are the lights.
I’m going to merge my work here.
That looks pretty good actually, this happy accident.
Preserve.
I basically kept my original lights.
Oh no, here it is.
I was able to combine it.
The last thing I’m going to do is add a little bit of texture.
I’m going to take a layer, put a mask on it because I don’t want it to go outside
of our boundary.
Then I got this little pokey-dot brush.
You can also do this with dissolve and I’m just going to add a little bit of texture
just to see if it looks good.
It may not look good.
Maybe I want her to be nice and smooth and polished looking.
This adds a lot of grit, and you’ve got to be careful, of course, on the face because
it feels like razor stubble.
I’m just going to undo that.
I do not want to add razor stubble to a female, especially a lead character like this.
Actually, I’m liking this texture.
Let me see if I put it in the above drawing, what happens?
Ooh .Right now it’s—
well, it was below the lights, that’s why I wasn’t seeing it that well.
If some of you are fans of like Drew Struzan, he is a famous poster artist, he does this
sort of thing with his movie posters, but he uses acrylic paint, of course.
He’s old school like me.
Alright, so that looks pretty good.
I’m going to put an end to it here.
That’s my third comp.
Let me just get them all in order.
Now I’m going to crop.
I just draw a marquis and do keyboard shortcut for cut or crop and boom.
We started with this one.
This one took quite a while because we had to do all the setup.
We had to set up all the layers,
make sure the frame was working.
Then once we had the setup, remember how easy this one came and then this one came?
It was a little bit tricky, but we basically had everything we needed to make quick, quick
instant variations.
That’s pretty cool.
Alright, so you got to see me do it.
I know I kind of went a little all over the place.
Again, if you get confused or you get lost, just review.
All of this stuff we’ve covered already.
You can review the previous sections because nothing I did was new or different from what
we covered, it was just done in a different sequence.
The sequence doesn’t really matter.
I mean, it kind of matters.
It depends on your style and your tastes and what you’re after.
The important thing is the tools.
Now you know how you can make comps quickly, hand drawn, you can scan your own drawing.
And then now you know how to set up your layers, all your clip masks and things to make quick
variation; boom, boom, boom, really fast, really easy.
All this stuff is exactly like how you would do it in traditional art.
I would have done this with marker and pen and pencil as well, but in Photoshop it’s
so fast and so easy.
We can make three more or we can make 30 more, no problem.
So, I hope you had fun.
Remember to review.
Remember to practice.
This is a lot of stuff we covered, but once you get familiar with it, it’ll seem like
a nice breezy walk in the part.
So, until next time, take care.
Okay, that brings us to the end of this lesson.
I hope you enjoyed the lesson.
I hope you learned a lot.
I know you’ve probably been waiting a long time to get into the meat, to get into actually
drawing in the computer from scratch.
We covered everything you need in this lesson here.
We covered the drawing.
We covered the shading.
We covered setting up your layers using masks.
All the various tips and techniques that you will need, and we also showed how all this
stuff can be applied as well moving forward to any project you want, not just making your
own comps.
So, we learned a lot of stuff here.
Make sure to review as much as possible.
I know if you’re not that experienced, a lot of these things may be a little confusing
and things.
But, that’s okay.
That’s why you can review.
Take your time.
Practice as much as possible.
If some of the subject matter like maybe drawing a skull or a portrait or whatever was too
complicated, you don’t have to do anything complicated like that.
You can create your own works, no matter what subject.
Just as long as you practice the computer and get some time using Photoshop on your
tablet, you’ll be okay.
So, now you know how to tone your drawings, and I hope to see the results of your work
and hope to see you in the next lesson.
Until next time, take care.
What we’re going to do here is we’re going to learn how to light and shade and render
a drawing that we did on paper.
So here, we’re going to take a drawing that we did on a piece of paper or in our sketchbook,
scan it into Photoshop, bring it into the computer and bring it into Photoshop.
Then I’m going to show you how to quickly add tone, how to set up your layers, and you’re
going to make the comp really beautiful, a black and white tonal comp, and then you’re
going to quickly make three different versions so you can compare.
That way, if you want to make a longer painting or drawing you have a beautiful composition
ready for you to go.
That’s the overview of the assignment.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Get your tablet and let’s begin.
Okay, in this second assignment, we’re going to use Photoshop to create comps based on
a drawing.
We’re going old school here.
What we’re going to do is take a drawing that we drew on paper, scan it into the computer.
We’re going to bring it into Photoshop and create three different comps using Photoshop
to add all the value and all the shading.
It’s going to be a lot of fun.
It’s very old school.
If you’re like me and you also love to draw and you love to shade, this is going to be
a really great and fun assignment for you.
Let’s get started.
Alright, what I’m going to do first is bring in the drawing that I already scanned here.
Okay, here you go.
This is—you might recognize it as a character from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
It’s an Ang Lee film that came out a few years ago but has wonderful cinematography.
I really enjoyed the photography.
It has wonderful characters.
What I’m going to do is take this drawing.
I’m going to create three different comps.
Let’s say I wanted to make a larger scale painting or maybe a more finished drawing.
What I want to do first, of course, is decide on the composition,
specifically the value composition.
You know, whether we want mostly darks, lights, whatever.
Photoshop is the perfect tool for doing that.
Let’s get started by first blocking in some shapes.
This scan is pretty big.
It’s pretty high risk and 300 dpi and, of course, set to tif.
What I’m going to do is make a new file first.
Just like we saw in previous examples, I’m going to make myself
three different thumbnails.
I’m going to first grab the drawing.
There are a couple ways to do this.
Here I’m going to just take the drawing, draw a marquis around it because I don’t
need all this white space.
It really doesn’t matter at this stage.
I’m just going to kind of drag it in there.
You can do that with a marquis or you can just, if there is no marquis and you just
want to grab the drawing and get started, what I do is I grab the layer itself and manually
drag it into the new document like that.
Or you can do cut and paste, CTL + A, CTL + C, that kind of thing.
I tend to just like to drag it in the document.
This looks pretty good.
That’s pretty big.
I’m going to shrink it down.
What I want to do is be able to fit three of these on one page, on one 8 x 10 sheet
so that I can print it out.
What I can do is start big with one and then reduce it in size.
So, first I’d like to make a, what do you call that?
A nice little frame so I know what the composition will be, and let’s see,
I’m going to drop the opacity.
What I want to do, this is too dark.
What I want to do is just take this background and kind of give myself a nice crop.
That’s the word I’m looking for.
I’d like to get the right crop that I want.
Once I have the right crop, I can apply it to the drawing.
Then I can either make a mask around the drawing, which I’m going to do here.
I want to eliminate all that other stuff.
Now, to make use of this drawing, meaning, what we’re going to do is we’re going
to keep the drawing untouched as its own layer, but we’re going to add the tones underneath
it on separate layers.
The quickest way to do that is to set it to multiply.
Right now it’s set to normal mode.
The drawing is on its own layer.
It’s surrounded by—let me show you.
If I turn the canvas black you can see the drawing is surrounded by white.
It was scanned on a sheet of paper.
First I’m going to turn it to multiply.
What multiply does is it eliminates the white of the paper, and all you can see is the darks.
It’s a great way if you scan a pencil drawing like this, it’s a great way to be able to
preserve your pencil drawing and use it as if you were toning with markers.
This is a very similar approach to using marker or perhaps watercolor where you would draw
on your paper or your board and then add the tones and the drawing is still preserved.
This works a lot like that.
Now, it’s set to multiplying.
I’m going to name it drawing.
Then I’m going to name the flat or BG.
It’s called BG.
I’m going to—first, let’s make the BG about 50%.
It’s a nice even midtone.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to add some tone to my character.
Let me make it 75%.
It’s a little easier for me to see.
Now I’m going to draw tones.
First I need a mask, of course.
Let’s see if I can use the magic wand.
What I really want to do is draw a mask around her silhouette so I can use all the clipping
masks and things. So, let’s see.
If magic wand is able to grab ahold—okay, in this case, it’s not working.
It’s not problem.
I’m going to have to draw a mask manually.
It’s not biggie.
We’ve done that many times.
Remember, I just typically like to draw a big crude mask sort of like this and then
fine tune it as I go.
Here I’m holding ALT.
Remember, if you get a little confused about this step, this was reviewed.
You can review the previous lessons on selections.
It’s such a powerful tool.
Basically, if you want to refine or modify your selection you hold ALT to cut in like
I’m doing.
You see the minus sign.
If you wanted to add you hold SHIFT and you see the plus sign.
In this case, all I’m doing is subtracting or cutting out, cutting into the selection
I already drew using the rectangular lasso tool.
It just gives me a lot of control.
Personally, I draw with a lot of straights as you may be noticing, a lot of straights here.
That’s just a personal taste in aesthetics.
This sword has a very unique curve to it.
I almost want to use the pen tool.
The pen tool gives you the ability to create beautiful long curves like this, the kind
of curves that are like a nightmare to draw by hand.
Let’s see, just cut it back in here.
For this one, I’m not going to render, per se, so we don’t have to worry too much about
the pencil line, how deep I cut into the pencil line.
It’s just going to be real basic.
For this one, let’s see if I could cut this out.
Notice I want to cut this out quickly, so I grab the magic wand and I hold ALT.
Notice, again, it turns to minus and then cut in.
Boom.
That’s pretty good.
That’s a pretty good cut.
See that?
Cut that space out because I held the minus key.
That was the magic wand tool.
In this case it worked because the silhouette was drawn fairly tight.
That should do it, I think, for a nice little mask.
Of course, I can modify the mask at any time.
Now that I’ve got a mask, I’ve got to make a new layer.
We’ll call it flat.
Then baboom.
We don’t want it pure black, of course.
Hue set and if you want precision, I’m just going to go to 50.
Nice and even, boom.
The flat is bigger than my boundary.
What I’m going to do here—actually, what I’m going to do is also make a frame.
There are a couple of ways to make a frame.
Yeah, what I think I want to do, let’s just lighten this up a little bit.
I need to cut this and draw, I’m basically trying to draw a black border
around the whole thing.
So, let’s see.
Let’s take this.
This is an object.
Put this on top.
I’m going to drop the fill.
This is a vector object, shape.
Remember, if you drop the fill to zero you can still have a nice clean stroke.
There you go, 24 pix.
That seems pretty good.
Let’s try 30 pix.
Oh, that seems better but it’s a little too tight so I have to expand it.
Let’s see.
I just want to make sure that because I set the stroke to inner instead of outer because
I wanted that clean tight edge.
Remember, if you set the stroke to outer you’ll get a curved edge.
So now that’s a pretty nice frame.
I’m liking that.
But, I want this to be cut off.
What I’m going to do is I can either apply a mask to all of this.
Or what I can do is make a folder.
I’m going to make a folder.
I’m going to make a group.
I’m selecting all, cmd + G.
If you have a bunch of layers selected it creates a group.
Then what I’m going to do is just call it layers.
All of my artwork will be in this layer in this folder.
Then I’m going to put a mask on this.
Now, everything in this folder will be in this mask, within this tight shape.
Now I don’t have to worry about going outside.
For example, I can just go like that, right, and it stays locked in.
My stroke or the frame, the black borders are at the top.
I’m going to call it frame just so I know what it is.
Now I’m good to go.
That was the setup.
It kind of went forward and backwards but that’s okay.
There are 500 ways to do the same thing.
That’s why I always kind of skip around and don’t always follow total linear logic.
Essentially, the steps are all the same.
The next stage is the shadow block in so I’m going to get myself a fairly nice dark midtone.
Let’s set this to 80.
Now I’ve got to decide how much of her will be in dark shadow.
It’s not, the lighting wasn’t ideal.
I don’t even know if this will be a good step, to be honest with you.
Typically, if I have a beautiful, clean shadow, I will almost always do this step.
But for this one, the shadow wasn’t that tight, as you can see.
It was kind of all over the place.
I forgot to clip it there.
Actually, you know, I’m going to call this layer darks.
These are my dark shadows.
Right now it’s set to 80% opacity, so it gives me a little bit of softness.
Not too much.
Let’s see here.
What I’m trying to do is give myself a nice, clean dark shadow shape and a little bit of
subtle tones there.
It’s not the cleanest, most uniform, most contrast-y shadow, but this is fine
for what I have to do.
Just adding tone where I feel that it needs it.
I’m using the same values, fairly dark value, but a soft airbrush this time.
You can see how beautiful the multiply layer is working.
The drawing is showing through.
Right now it’s beautiful so you’re getting some of the value and tone from the drawing
already.
Okay, so we’ll call this darks.
This one I probably won’t need to add variation or anything, so I’m going to go ahead and
mask it right there.
That way I don’t need to clip it.
So, for the flats, I’m going to go ahead and mask it.
I’m going to go ahead and give it some variation.
That’s what I meant to say.
I’m going to go from bottom up.
I am imagining the light source is upper left or straight up.
I’m going to go from the bottom left there.
Let’s see what else I can do.
That was just a general pass.
It looks really nice.
I’m going to do a lighter pass using the gradient tool.
We’re going to clip that as well.
I want to see what happens if I expand that a little bit.
I want that feeling that light is coming from above.
It looks really nice so far.
So, I like that so far.
It’s a little too contrast-y.
What I’m going to do is mask out the areas that should be dark, like the sockets.
I think that’s the problem with that highlight.
It’s washing out my lights a little too much or my darks a little too much.
I don’t really want that.
Okay, it’s good.
Drop it a little bit more.
That’s good.
It’s perfect.
Call it variation.
Let’s see what’s next.
What I’d like to do is get a subtle gradation just on this outfit so I’m going to mask it out.
See that?
Yeah, beautiful.
I work in a traditional
So, a little bit darker there.
I also want to do it here at the arm.
I’m masking out this section because I don’t
want to affect this section or really anything else.
That’s why I’m going to use a mask because I like to use the gradient tool so you see
that beautiful gradient that happened there.
Whoops, I should probably put in another layer.
Always try to put things on a new layer.
That way I could always adjust each operation and fine tune it.
Then if I’m happy with it I can merge down.
One more pass, right here.
Maybe a couple of more passes.
I just want to affect this shirt thing or sleeve there.
It’s going bottom up and inside out.
That one is a little too, oops, a little too aggressive up top.
I’m basically doing some really quick washes of tone.
You may notice that it feels like tone, so now I have my darks and my mids but no light.
So first I’m going to put a light here, but let me darken the backgrounds.
This is one of my first decisions, and there are a bunch of ways to do this.
I like gradient tools so much.
Let me just try that.
Let me just darken the background.
Then I’m going to clip it and then maybe add some texture at the bottom.
Let’s see what that looks like.
I don’t know.
I’m not quite sure how light I want it to be.
You know, you don’t have to use a brush like that.
You could have just slapped on a gradient.
It would have worked just as well.
I just wanted to see what it looked like with a little bit of texture.
That’s one of the things I could use this step for, of course, is to figure out does
textured background than a soft quiet background like that.
I’m not sure.
I guess we’re going to find out.
Let’s try it this tall.
I kind of like that grainy look.
That looks kind of cool.
Let’s see if we can blur it.
Filter, blur.
Let’s try motion blur.
Let’s clip that.
Then we’ll add a mask.
I’m just trying a bunch of different things right now.
So, this feels pretty good.
It feels like a pretty good start.
Let me get a little more.
I’m still not quite happy with the value there.
Let me get a little bit more, oops, let me just focus on the value for now.
Alright, let’s do that.
That’s more of a chiaroscuro, I like that much better actually.
Ok, good, let’s settle on that as a background.
Now you can see the mask right here isn’t that clean.
Let me clean that up.
This is all this noise, a little disturbing.
All I have to do is tighten up the mask.
That was, remember here we used the wand tool, magic wand to quickly select this area.
But sometimes the tools you still need to do some cleanup work.
That’s okay.
They get us almost all the way there.
That’s what the tools and shortcuts there.
They kind of get you in the ballpark, and then from there you can take over and fine
tune it, refine it.
Polish it.
Okay, let’s see.
Looks pretty good.
Let’s see if I can clean up this sword a little bit.
That’s why I think I should have used a curve here.
The pixelatedness is alright.
Notice I’m using erase so I have to be a little bit careful, versus using a mask.
I know I say using a mask is a little bit more, little bit safer for sure, but I think
it’s more, it’s a smarter way to work.
I’m just being a little lazy here.
Okay, so the mask is pretty tight.
Let me get some tone on her hair.
We’ll call these darks.
Oh now, these are the darks.
What are these?
Are these darks too?
Okay.
That’s too harsh.
I wanted to make sure I put that separate layer right there.
Just clean up that little bit of dark around her hair.
If I want to put a rim light there, of course, I can do that later.
Alright, so now I’m set up.
Call it BG tone.
Now I’m set up to do the lights.
I needed some value in the background because right now it’s surrounded by fairly light
value, 75% gray, so I won’t be able to judge them correctly until I do this.
Now I have a choice.
Let’s see, should I put the brightest bright on the sword?
I believe in the reference it’s on the sword.
This is not clean.
Or, should I put the brightest bright on the…
also, guys, you might be noticing that I rotate the canvas.
In this version of Photoshop it’s with the R key.
But, you know, you could also just do your, remember flip canvas hot keys.
They work pretty well, too, but the R gives you this arbitrary rotation.
Just click R and to get out of rotation mode just hit escape.
Then back to normal.
Okay, so this part is a little tricky because—well, it’s not tricky.
Everything you see me do we’ve already done, but it’s the order that’s tricky.
Right now my mind is like, well, should I do this?
Should I do this?
The order kind of really doesn’t matter.
We’re basically doing a sketch thumbnail.
It’s kind of what we’re doing here.
You know, we’re not doing anything finished or rendering.
And also, Photoshop there literally are 50 ways, there are probably a 100 different ways
we could have done what you just saw.
It may feel like I’m skipping steps, doing this, which I am, but don’t worry so much
about the order.
Just pay attention to the tools that we’ve already covered.
Lassos, layering, adjustments, gradations, clips, clip masks, all the stuff we covered.
I’m just using the basic tools, but you’ve just seen me do it
in a slightly different sequence.
Now we’re almost done with the setup.
What I’m doing here is setting up so that we can quickly have the setup, the layers,
the masks ready to do quick and easy variations.
Once I have this setup, once I have the layers set up the way that we need we can quickly
make boom, boom, boom, three different versions.
Just be patient a little bit here.
With practice you’ll be able to come up with your own way.
Right now you’re just watching me do it the way that I’m comfortable with, the way
that I think is the most efficient, but the sequence is kind of jumbled.
Don’t worry about that.
We’re almost done with the setup mode.
The last thing I need is light.
Alright, let’s set up the lights.
Alright, let’s set up the lights.
What I’m going to do is, let me try this real quick.
Let me just try this.
I’m going to make a layer.
I’m just going to copy.
I’m going to make it a layer, clip it, call it lights.
I’m going to start, I know it has an I. I know lights has an I. I know there is a
highlight in her face, I know that much.
Let’s try that.
It looks pretty good.
Let me adjust the temperature, or not temperature, the brightness.
I was skipping ahead to the painting lesson.
I want to make sure you guys come back for the color lesson next time.
Let’s do a couple of more.
Using all gradation tool because it’s just such a beautiful and soft way to work.
My brush work can be like 50/50.
Sometimes it looks okay.
Sometimes it looks like total crap.
I really like the gradient tool for this reason.
Because I have unlimited layers I can make as many layers as I need and crop and edit
and do all this good stuff that I like to do.
I saw three pieces there, the cheek, the nose, and the forehead, all three different layers.
I’m just going to merge them.
I’m pretty happy with what I got, and it didn’t preserve the thing.
Typically, it can preserve the—now I’m doing some manual brushing here.
I want to give her some highlights here.
Put that little highlight on her shield there.
I’m pretty sure I’m going to put the bright highlight
on this area, the sword blade.
I don’t have to do.
I’m just going to make a comp and test it.
That’s the beauty of Photoshop.
I’m just testing a theory that the highlight, the brightest spot on the sword will look
pretty good, will look the best, I don’t know.
You don’t know until you try it out.
Test the theory.
That’s what a thumbnail is.
You’re creating a theory that my picture will look better if I do X, Y, and Z.
I want to do this in a couple of layers.
I know it’s a sloppy mask.
I’ll do this in a couple of layers.
Actually, let me include the sword.
I don’t need to mask the actual blade because it’s already clipped.
I do need to mask where the blade intersects with her body, overlaps her body, like this area.
I want that to be fairly tight because what I’m going to do now will only affect the
blade itself.
I’m going to make a new layer.
Put this guy on it.
This is the mask for the blade itself.
Then I’m going to start with pure white.
I’m just going to do reflective gradient.
Perfected the mask.
What I’m going to do is draw a marquis around this area because when you do reflective gradient
it—this one needs to be clipped first.
Okay, there you go.
Reflective gradient you can change the angle very quickly just by rotating it.
That’s one of the features I love about gradation tool.
Combine it with layers, it’s just so, so powerful.
This is like a general glow on the sword there, which I’m loving right now.
I’m loving it.
I wish—actually, I’m going to make a new mask.
It’s not masking correctly.
The effect I want isn’t masking correctly.
Now I just need the mask of the sword itself and the handle there.
Again, you’re seeing me do the sequence kind of jumbled here,
but the tools are all the same.
Okay, now I got a nice, tight mask.
Is it a tight mask, though?
Not really.
There we go.
Awesome.
Okay, so now I’ve got a really tight mask.
I’m going to delete this guy.
Delete.
Do you see how it went over?
Now I’m going to call this sword.
Alright, here we go.
I’ll call this lights.
Sword.
Alright, soon you will see why I’m going through this much trouble once these layers
are set up correctly.
You’ll see the benefit of doing it this way.
There is one more thing I want to add there which is right here.
This one feels a little flat.
You saw it transform the mask as well.
That’s what you were seeing there.
They were linked.
Now they’re unlinked so I’m able to transform the layer by itself.
Go one more time.
Whenever you see me make a new move, I’m pretty much always doing this: making a new
layer and then using the set of options that I have to modify and fine tune it.
There you go.
Preserve.
I’m going to delete where it goes inside the, or erase.
I still don’t like how this hand is looking.
It does need a little bit of light there but not too much.
Just some more aggressive manual brushing.
Anyway, let’s get back to the sword.
I’m going to drop that, what I just did, because I want a bright, bright highlight
right down the middle so I’m going to make a new layer, duplicate the mask by holding
ALT and dragging.
Now I’m going to make a marquis because I don’t want the gradient to spill all over
the canvas, which may be hard to rotate, make it very hard to rotate.
So now I’m just going to slap it on there.
That looks pretty good.
What I can even do is drag this layer above the drawing.
See what happens there.
Now it looks really, really bright.
I wish I could do that one more time, probably.
I should keep doing that.
Probably draw another marquis.
Let’s try that just for fun.
Let’s see.
The blade handle will have its own—so, I’m going to make a folder.
I’m going to put the mask of the blade in the folder, and within that folder I’m going
to put a layer, an empty layer.
I’m going to put the mass that I just drew so now I can affect only the part of the blade,
but the folder masks out the blade itself.
So I’m basically using two masks at once.
Then I can do that.
Yes!
See that?
It only affects the area that I drew, but it also stays locked into the blade.
It’s sort of a double mask technique.
I’m going to clean up that edge.
It’s way to funky and hard.
I can do it here.
Just clean up the mask.
Again, using the option to clean up my work and lower the opacity a little bit.
Yeah, it feels okay.
I can move it.
It’s still active.
It’s still a mask.
I can kind of move it around to see what I like best.
I can rotate it.
See how it might look best.
I think that looks pretty good right there.
Now what I’m going to do is merge all of this work that I just did into this layer.
I kind of want it to preserve the sword.
There we go.
I merged the group, and I hit merge down and it preserved the layer.
I’m going to do a little bit of subtle erasing right here just on that part.
Yeah.
Too subtle there.
Okay, now I’ve got a nice comp.
Now I finally have a comp.
Now, in this comp my darks are pretty much around her, her dark accents.
Midtones are her outfit, her skin.
The lights are some of the lights on her skin and also the brightest highlight here is on
the sword and also on the handle.
It’s like a two-value system.
I can even do this.
One more thing.
Just for fun I have a brush that creates a bling effect.
I like that.
That way you know, okay, there is the brightest highlight.
Let’s drop the opacity a little bit.
So, I like that comp.
I’m going to call this comp 1.
I’m going to save this as comp dash demo.
Great.
Let’s try a couple of different versions.
What if the one obvious example is what if I want the brightest highlight on her?
Let’s try that.
Very easy.
I’m going to duplicate my work.
Call this comp 2, and I’m going to move comp 1 above and move comp 2, just drag it
and slide it down.
Oh, it didn’t copy the layer or the mask.
Oh, I forgot to put the frames.
I forgot to include the frame.
This is the layers.
This is the frame.
I need them both.
I’m going to put the frames and the layers folder, select them both, cmd + G,
call up a new folder. Call this comp 1.
Now, inside the folder I have the frame and all the layers with the mask.
It keeps it nice and tight.
Okay, now I can duplicate this.
Call this comp 2.
I’m going to change the order.
Move it don because this one will go below it.
I don’t have to do that.
I just know that 1 is at the top, 2 is on the bottom.
They’ll be a third one, which we’ll have to adjust the size in a minute.
Now, we’ve got all the layers that we need.
Let’s say I don’t like that sparkle.
I don’t like all that sword highlight, all that stuff.
I like the highlights.
What if I want to put the brightest highlight on her face.
Let’s say I keep the sword but the sword is toned down?
But, I want the brightest highlight on her face,
and I want to put that above the drawing, actually.
Now I’m going to use pure Photoshop drawing, toning here.
I’m not using any tools, just using the pen.
I’m just going to add the highlights where I think they belong.
A little bit of highlight on her shirt there.
Little bit more highlight on the top plane of her costume there.
That looks pretty good.
Then what I’m going to do is I’m going to intentionally brighten her.
Let’s see, I’m just going to make her brighter.
I’m pretty much going to make the world brighter too.
Oh, I like that.
I just lowered the opacity, really, of that.
Do you see how powerful the layering system is, now you’re starting to see, oh, that’s
why he did all that damn work.
Now I can do this.
Let me change the brightness.
Remember, all this tonal work we did it right here in the beginning.
I can either drop the opacity, or I can do a combination of both lightening it.
I just want to see what it looks like if she’s brighter.
I kind of erase this out, this little extra bit of darkness that I did there.
Now, she’s a little bit brighter, a little bit brighter all over.
A lot of the attention is on her face now because the brightest highlight is there.
You may want that.
You may not.
Adding a little bit of texture.
This is kind of cool now.
It’s kind of like hatching.
It’s exactly what I would on paper.
I’m just adding a few more highlights down here just to see what it looked like.
Of course, I can do that because it’s a comp.
I think that’s starting to look pretty nice, actually.
Wow.
I don’t know, what do you guys think at home?
I’m comparing these two, and it’s looking like the bottom one looks pretty good, huh?
Okay.
That’s it.
That’s my third comp.
I wanted to test two things: if the highlight looked better on her than the sword, and if
the background should be lighter her outfit should be lighter.
Let’s try one more comp.
I don’t think I need that anymore.
I don’t need that anymore.
We’ll call this highlights.
And it’s above the drawing so I don’t care if it goes outside the borders of the mask.
Yeah, it looks pretty good.
Okay, so what I’m going to do is I’m going to copy this one again, just click hold and drag.
Call it comp 3.
Should we go down or to the right?
Let’s go to the right.
That way you guys can see.
I’m just going to expand my canvas.
I used the crop tool.
Sorry, you may not have seen that.
That’s one way to expand the canvas.
Let me undo that.
I just take the crop tool.
The shortcut is C. Select the whole canvas and then drag it.
You can crop it by going smaller, of course.
You can also drag it to go bigger.
I’m just going to drag it to about double the size.
Remember, we also can do that with canvas size.
Now I need to correct the gap, this black space.
I just selected the tone that I put there on a new layer.
Now I’ve got a bigger canvas.
Now I’m just going to drag comp 3 to the right so now we can see.
We can actually make four comps now.
Okay, so what’s one more combination we can try?
What if make her—let’s make her super dark.
This is kind of like a low key, high key, mid key.
We can make a flatter one.
I’m not quite sure what to do here, what kind of combination.
Let’s try a different background idea.
Let’s try a different background.
Let’s just try that because we can.
So, we’ve got my layers.
Take the background tone and what I’m going to do first is,
I kind of like this darkness to it.
Let’s just see what it looks like if we add texture.
Let’s try that.
Texture and…
I’m going to put that on its own layer.
All these custom brushes are just quick ways to make texture.
Okay, BG texture.
Let’s see.
It looks nice when it’s really dark, actually.
Let me try this.
I like the texture so I’m just going to see, put on a hue set, see if it looks good
when it’s—ooh, it does look pretty good when it’s darker.
I like that.
I like that.
I’m just going to go ahead and put that together, just merge it down with the work
that I had.
Then I’m going to try one more thing.
I want that beam of light to expand kind of past her a little bit.
I’m going to make a circular gradient with dissolve.
Change it to like pure bright white.
Now we know that’s too bright.
It doesn’t really matter.
Because it’s on its own layer, you can change the shape as much as a I want.
Now I’m going go to do a filter.
Actually, let me cut into it a little bit here.
By cut into it, I mean let me see if I can erase out of it and randomize it a little bit.
I’m going to apply a filter and see what that does.
Filter, blur, motion blur.
They would all do cool and interesting things.
This might not be the right texture for this.
Well, it was worth a try.
I don’t know, I kind of like that.
It’s a little bit peeking behind her.
Yeah, let’s leave it like that for now.
Just leave it at that for now.
Now it’s too dark or it’s too bright.
Okay, that’s better.
It’s just a little too dark, too bright, excuse me.
Okay, so a textured background.
Right away I don’t like—it doesn’t look as good as this one.
Let me make it a little bit more subtle.
Wipe this off.
Okay, that’s okay.
Still not happy with it, but let’s move on here.
What other variations can I try?
Let’s see.
This looks okay with a really dark background.
Let’s see if we can make our lower forms a little bit brighter.
Let’s add some more light to these lower forms.
Let’s see, highlight, let’s keep that.
Make a layer right above lights.
Oops, let’s just start to see what we can get here.
What I want to see is if it looks good to bring out these forms, meaning make them catch
some light here.
It’s what I’m doing here.
Right away I’m not liking this as much as the previous one.
Just the brush works looks a little sloppy.
I think just compositionally it’s not as strong.
Nice bright contrast, that nice contrast between the darks and the lights up top, it has a
nice feeling of fall off.
Hmm, it looks okay.
Yeah, it looks okay.
Take that gradient a little bit over here.
It looks okay.
Now I’m not liking the background.
Let’s keep things simple here.
What I’m going to do is make a plain old dark background, and I’m going to give this
one a little bit of noise.
I’m just going to make a new layer.
This is pure black here.
It’s a little bit of texture and noise.
That way it’s not super flat and dark.
Let’s drop the opacity there, just make it more subtle.
Now I have some texture.
Let me make some—there you go.
I just want that texture to be really subtle.
Now I’m going to do a—let’s try this.
Let’s try this.
I’m going to make a nice hot spot.
Ooh, that looks pretty good.
It looks pretty good.
It’s really dramatic.
It’s like a poster, almost.
Like a movie poster, I like that.
That was just kind of an accident.
I was hoping for this splatter brush, actually.
This kind of random and organic, which is good and bad.
It’s good because it is random.
You have very little control over it.
When you touch it down it kind of looks different, kind of like that, just make it subtle.
Yes, I’m liking this.
I’m glad I tried it.
You’ll see me struggle through it.
Ooh, I like that.
So, in this case, yeah, we have a dark background with this cool mystical effect on her.
What I can even do is try this.
Let’s try this.
I’m going to take her lights.
Let’s see what happens.
I’m going to duplicate this, the lights.
In case I don’t like what I’m about to do, I can bring back the original.
Turn down the lights here on her face even more.
I’m kind of liking that.
What I’m trying to do is get, let’s see if I can get a hard, hard highlight on her
and have this one go above the pencil line so it’s really, really bright.
Now there is like a nice, specular highlight.
Specular just means it’s more reflective.
Let’s say her skin is a little bit oily or has moisture on it, sweat.
Things become much more reflective.
So, don’t worry about what it’s called.
Just know that, hey, you’re making a comp, and you’ve got to make your comp look good.
Sometimes your highlights have to go really hard.
I’m going to try a different tool.
I’m going to use gradient tool.
Like that.
Alright, now she has some specular highlights.
A little bit different than down here.
I kind of like that.
Let me add some more spec highlights.
This makes it feel like very movie poster-y, which I’m loving that look.
Do you know what I mean?
It looks very dramatic.
I’m loving it.
Then one last thing I want to try is texture.
What I’m going to do is I’m going to make a mask.
I’m going to put this above.
These are the lights.
I’m going to merge my work here.
That looks pretty good actually, this happy accident.
Preserve.
I basically kept my original lights.
Oh no, here it is.
I was able to combine it.
The last thing I’m going to do is add a little bit of texture.
I’m going to take a layer, put a mask on it because I don’t want it to go outside
of our boundary.
Then I got this little pokey-dot brush.
You can also do this with dissolve and I’m just going to add a little bit of texture
just to see if it looks good.
It may not look good.
Maybe I want her to be nice and smooth and polished looking.
This adds a lot of grit, and you’ve got to be careful, of course, on the face because
it feels like razor stubble.
I’m just going to undo that.
I do not want to add razor stubble to a female, especially a lead character like this.
Actually, I’m liking this texture.
Let me see if I put it in the above drawing, what happens?
Ooh .Right now it’s—
well, it was below the lights, that’s why I wasn’t seeing it that well.
If some of you are fans of like Drew Struzan, he is a famous poster artist, he does this
sort of thing with his movie posters, but he uses acrylic paint, of course.
He’s old school like me.
Alright, so that looks pretty good.
I’m going to put an end to it here.
That’s my third comp.
Let me just get them all in order.
Now I’m going to crop.
I just draw a marquis and do keyboard shortcut for cut or crop and boom.
We started with this one.
This one took quite a while because we had to do all the setup.
We had to set up all the layers,
make sure the frame was working.
Then once we had the setup, remember how easy this one came and then this one came?
It was a little bit tricky, but we basically had everything we needed to make quick, quick
instant variations.
That’s pretty cool.
Alright, so you got to see me do it.
I know I kind of went a little all over the place.
Again, if you get confused or you get lost, just review.
All of this stuff we’ve covered already.
You can review the previous sections because nothing I did was new or different from what
we covered, it was just done in a different sequence.
The sequence doesn’t really matter.
I mean, it kind of matters.
It depends on your style and your tastes and what you’re after.
The important thing is the tools.
Now you know how you can make comps quickly, hand drawn, you can scan your own drawing.
And then now you know how to set up your layers, all your clip masks and things to make quick
variation; boom, boom, boom, really fast, really easy.
All this stuff is exactly like how you would do it in traditional art.
I would have done this with marker and pen and pencil as well, but in Photoshop it’s
so fast and so easy.
We can make three more or we can make 30 more, no problem.
So, I hope you had fun.
Remember to review.
Remember to practice.
This is a lot of stuff we covered, but once you get familiar with it, it’ll seem like
a nice breezy walk in the part.
So, until next time, take care.
Okay, that brings us to the end of this lesson.
I hope you enjoyed the lesson.
I hope you learned a lot.
I know you’ve probably been waiting a long time to get into the meat, to get into actually
drawing in the computer from scratch.
We covered everything you need in this lesson here.
We covered the drawing.
We covered the shading.
We covered setting up your layers using masks.
All the various tips and techniques that you will need, and we also showed how all this
stuff can be applied as well moving forward to any project you want, not just making your
own comps.
So, we learned a lot of stuff here.
Make sure to review as much as possible.
I know if you’re not that experienced, a lot of these things may be a little confusing
and things.
But, that’s okay.
That’s why you can review.
Take your time.
Practice as much as possible.
If some of the subject matter like maybe drawing a skull or a portrait or whatever was too
complicated, you don’t have to do anything complicated like that.
You can create your own works, no matter what subject.
Just as long as you practice the computer and get some time using Photoshop on your
tablet, you’ll be okay.
So, now you know how to tone your drawings, and I hope to see the results of your work
and hope to see you in the next lesson.
Until next time, take care.
Reference Images
Free to try
Watch the whole lesson with a subscription
-
17m 25s
2. Review: Shortcuts, Tools, and DPI -
13m 5s
3. Making Vector Frames for Thumbnails -
16m 1s
4. Making Frames with the Marquee Tool and Other Canvas Creation Tips -
22m 7s
5. Making Custom Brushes -
24m 41s
6. Adjusting Values with Hue/Sat Tool and Arranging Drafts on Layers -
12m 21s
7. Adding Tone: Paint Bucket, Magic Wand, Saving Selection, Gradation Tool -
31m 1s
8. Clipping Masks -
6m 37s
9. Final Touches -
41m 38s
10. Assignment 1: Skull -
1h 11m 11s
11. Assignment 2: Editing Variations of Existing Artwork
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